Derek Hansen is one of the most successful colorists in Los Angeles, with experience from high-end commercial work at MPC, The Mill and Arsenal Creative. In this masterclass you are invited into his color suite to watch how he creates great looking images and discuss workflow, techniques, creativity and strategies that will help you become a better colorist.
The course is about the art and craft of color grading and is not designed to teach the operations of a specific software.
Derek Hansen is a world-renowned colorist with background from MPC, The Mill and Arsenal Creative. He has crafted images for many top directors such as Gia Coppola, Young Replicant, Luke Monahan and Brian Buckley, and graded music videos for artists such as Miley Cyrus, St. Vincent, J. Cole and Mehan Trainor to name a few.
Derek is setting up the color workflow and analyzing the scene.
Starting with the primary balance and discussing the importance of it.
Discussing layer organization and grade rippling.
Balancing and discussing all the decisions to be made when it comes to brightness and exposure. Dealing with challenges such as thin images and sharp highlights.
Analyzing the references from the client and preparing for the look creation.
In this lesson Derek recreates some of the characteristics of Kodak Eastman, and use techniques to compress the midtones and control the highlights.
Continuing the work of recreating the Kodak Eastman look, compressing the image with hue curves and creating deep rich saturated colors.
Pushing and hue-shifting the individual colors to bring the colors into harmony and create a stronger look.
Finessing the look by bringing in the red film tones.
Finishing it all up with some shadow, highlight and skin keys to create a better match.
27 Comments
Carson Jones
Derek’s masterclass was fantastic. Really appreciate getting to see how he works.
Robert Kitto
This is a fantastic insight. Is there a link to see Dereks’s completed grade of this? Thanks!!
Sander Ges
Can Someone elaborate how Dereks approach under ‘deep saturation’ applies in Davinci Resolve? Is this a luma vs saturation curve, brought down as a whole? And does this come after the (luma) curve?
I don’t understand the theory behind this, what is the difference of bringing down 2 stops with the luma vs sat, in stead of a general exposure / offset adjustment?
Jesper Hammarbäck
Hi, The input color space should be Arri Log C and Timeline Color should be Rec.709 Gamma 2.4 (In Davinci Resolve)
Kevin McCormack
I want to thank the team at Lowepost for this tutorial. I think that this format is very constructive. Lots of tutorials show you what buttons to press, but when learning anything, I feel that getting to know the principles and the whys of a process or technique is always the most enlightening and engaging. Having Derek walk us through his process was a real treat.
I do wish there were more details, having shots that got a little more specific with the details of what he was doing, but apart from that, I thought this was an excellent tutorial.
Again, thanks for this, and looking forward to the next one.
Amit Mishra
Amazing great stuff ,plz make a course on HDR dolby vision for Netflix (master out) or amazon etc
Phil O'Dea
Hi Andree,
in my experience a lot of the bigger facilities running Baselight try to keep their colourist colouring, which is what I think Derek is focusing on in this tutorial. The fixing & finishing would probably be passed on to the GFX department. If you want the in and outs of object removal, look at the Paint Fixing in Resolve Fusion course by Lee Lanier.
I’m a freelance editor/colourist and unlike big facilities I have to do as much as I can in Resolve, editing, colouring & fixing shots. So I’ve found all the Fusion ccources very helpful, worth a look at.
Andree Markefors
Once we arrived at ‘secondaries’ I was curious to see if we’d get a short ‘fixes’ to remove the mic dip into frame with the man eating chips agains the window… 😊
I agree with others about the value of being able to listen to established pros with some weight to their name.
But I feel a course like this could go quite a bit deeper in showing practical approaches to solving what is talked about—while still keeping it software agnostic. I’m on Resolve but don’t mind Baselight being used. There were some cutaway shots to scopes, but it felt more like B-roll to me, than actually showing a “method to the madness”.
I also think Lowepost should move to a more professional video delivering system. For online courses ‘Teachable’ is great. As in really great. I’m forced to use Chrome browser instead of Safari and there is no auto play of content.
There, I’m off my box. Just trying to provide constructive feedback—I really enjoy the courses.
Karim Zavaleta
Great Master class. a lot of information!!!!!
Thanks
Thomas Singh
This is probably the coolest colorist course I have seen, it felt like I was sitting on a chair next to him in the color suite! Well done Lowepost, you deliver unbetable content over and over again.
Lawrence Martinez
This is great! It would be awesome to see an overlay of the scopes.
Jan Klier
Fantastic masterclass. Focused on the thinking and technique that applies everywhere. About the craft not the tools. Thank you.
Benjamin Folts
Very valuable software agnostic insight from a professional. Very cool idea for a class. Lowe Post nailed it with this one.
Dimitrios Papagiannis
Thank you gentlemen.
Derek do you find yourself in the position sometimes where you are asked to come up with a look(s) without any references and if so what is what is your game plan for such a situation
Also any “begining baselight” courses for those of us that have the student edition would be most desirable.
Margus Voll
I think he mentioned some things he does under base grade and some in look depending situation.
I work now in a siular way a bit and it really depends now and then as some things are good to do under and some after.
I would say play around variations and see how you like it most.
My experiences are from Scratch and Resolve now but hope to utilize this class information in Sudent soon.
Margus Voll
I was thinking if stack order is available to see somehow.
vivian pimenta
Excellent! Could you please overlay the Parade Scopes over the fullscreen monitor output? It would help to see the adjustments.
Margus Voll
Explainig the structure is brilliant!
Balancing and looks fallback logic is also very valuable explanation.
Very nice class!
Jake Keller
There’s a student version of Baselight available for those who don’t have access to the system and want to practice the techniques shared.
Sign up for it here: https://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/training/student/blstudent.php
On the activation screen enter “400” for remaining days before it expires and you’re good to go for over a year.
Leo
more baselight courses please!
amazing
Phil O'Dea
I’ve done various grading classes over the past few years & the one thing that always gets me is how rarely I see a colourist actually colouring. Thank you Derek for this real look over the shoulder of a pro at work. I’d love to see more of these breakdowns, they are invaluable.
Denis Belinskiy
Do I understand correctly that in Davinci color setup will look like this:
Sathya Abhinav
Yes, this is a custom color management of Davinci resolve that helps you to decide which color space to work on.
This also simplifies your work by just giving you what the director saw while shooting on set
Yves Roy
This really is a great insight. Thanks so much Derek and Lowepost for putting it out!
Any chance we could get a glimpse of your layer stack and your tendency and logic on were you like to place your most common operators?
Szymon Ronowicz
Such an amazing masterclass!! Definitely gave me better understanding of my current workflows! Resolve is my tool of trade and I had no issues with using Derek’s tips back in Blackmagick’s software <3
Tom Evans
Thank you Derek. I really do admire your work and think you had one of the most interesting reels over at The Mill those years. The looks you created was always inspiring and I often bring some of the old frames up for reference in my work.
Jose Arce
Nice course…very educative