John Daro is a world-renowned senior colorist working at Warner Bros in Los Angeles, and in this masterclass you are invited into his color suite. John has color graded feature films and tv-series for all the major studios in Hollywood and will teach you techniques 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.
John Daro is a world-renowned colorist that started his career at FotoKem in Burbank, Los Angeles. At FotoKem he pioneered post production techniques and was one of the original colorist team members which led FotoKem to be one of the top post production houses in the world. Now John is working with color grading feature films and tv-series at Warner Bros in Hollywood.
In this lesson John teaches how to balance and match images using printer light techniques. He explores ways to work with exposure, contrast and saturation to preserve the original intent of the photography. Strategies related to black- and white levels, gamma work and color biases are also discussed. All the shots John is working with are available for download.
John moves on to discuss story telling and the creative decisions behind a the color grade, and walk through the process of creating great looking images and creative looks.
In this lesson John talks about different approaches to separate skin tones, and gives a solid approach to build an HSL key for isolating skin tones.
29 Comments
Jerome Berlaimont
Juste incroyable, c’est vraiment la meilleur chose a montrer, suivre un artise dans son process creatif 🙂 Merci. Jérôme Belgium
Translated: Just amazing, it’s really the best thing to show, to follow an art in your creative process 🙂 Thank you. Jerome Belgium
Admin edit: Added translation
Kevin McCormack
Amazing class. Such wonderful insights. I love it.
Fige Deegbe
I’m having problems with extracting the Project files from this lesson
Abby Bader
Unzipping?
Fige Deegbe
I got it to work🙏🏽
Ioannis Stergioulis
Great great great color class!!! Simple approach on grading, creating looks and skin keying that is short, condensed and applicable in real life projects… something that you don’t see at other complicated misinformative lessons that are out there!
Thanks soooo much for your insights mr Daro and thank you Lowepost for sharing the knowledge in such a nice way!!
Hugh Lutley
First time here at Lowepost. I am really liking the content but it feels like this is just an except from a longer class.
Jamie Neale
Great tutorials. It’s good to have a mix of more conversational lessons and technical how-to’s.
Robert Rodriguez
A wonderful masterclass many thanks for sharing your knowledge.
Benjamin Folts
This was very interesting to watch. Thank you!
Robert Kitto
Great advice! Thanks
Nicholas Zimmerman
Well this was a surprise! John and I worked together years ago at Fotokem, and I didn’t have a clue he was running one of the master classes when I signed up for Lowepost.
Studio Django
Thanks John and Lowepost for putting this together! These masterclass grading courses are the best. 👌
Jesper Hammarbäck
Thanks John and Lowepost for putting this together! These masterclass grading courses are the best. 👌
Jesper Hammarbäck
Would love to know what camera was used for all the materials so we get proper start when we start grading.
Abby Bader
Alexa
Jesper Hammarbäck
Thanks 🙂
Phil O'Dea
Not just buttons & knobs… you can get that in the manual. This is another peek over the shoulder at a colourist at work, with some great tips too. I’d really love to see more of these. Thanks John & Lowepost for a great insight.
Yves Roy
Another really great insight. Thanks so much John and Lowepost for putting this together!
This mini class is short, no bullshit and to the point, conveying fundamentals to stick to that really make a difference.
Mr. Daro thank you very much for sparing us the often encountered nonsense, self-profiling talk. Refreshingly honest and greatly appreciate it! 🙏
Karim Zavaleta
Nice class!!!! I love it!!!
Daniel Rheaume
Loved this class!
I was definitely interested in how to achieve a similar effect to what John does with Baselight’s Texture Equalizer tool in Resolve, as John mentions it is possible (albeit with a large node tree). I have seen tutorials online about frequency separation with resolve, but all seem to essentially break the frequencies into low/high, whereas John’s tool seems to have many different frequencies he can isolate.
Is there anyone with knowledge to share on how to build a tool like this in Resolve/Fusion?
Many thanks again for this great course!
Amada Daro
It’s well explained in lesson 6 & 8 in the Beauty Retouching course:
https://lowepost.com/courses/visual-effects/beauty/davinci-resolve-beauty-retouching-r14/
Daniel Rheaume
Hey Amada!
Thanks for your reply and directing me to those Fusion lessons –
I had watched them before posting, but I still don’t see how to recreate John’s tool in Baselight.
He seems to have access to multiple frequencies that he can blur or sharpen locally. Following the lessons above, you either get the Resolve Beauty tool, which is a bit of a black box as far as what frequencies it’s working on, etc…
The custom frequency separation tool he describes building in fusion also seems to basically only separate the frequencies into high and low, and then controls the re-combining of them. But I don’t see any way to isolate frequency ranges as John’s tool in Baselight does. Maybe I’m missing something?
Thanks again!
Fige Deegbe
The texture pop OFX may help you do just that
Gasa E Kenny
Brilliant stuff. Wish it was longer. He speaks very well and I like his interview, such great break down.
Joergen Erik Assentoft
Thanks for the class 🙂
Jose Arce
Great great masterclass, keep doing this stuff.
Elliot M. Smith
Very good!
Tom Evans
Nice one! Super solid masterclass, thanks John!