Recently I've moved from Final Cut Pro, to Adobe Premiere and now with Davinci Resolve. It's super powerful and I'm enjoying it. I just wonder, does anyone know of some intermediate to advanced tutorials or courses I can sign up for? I would love to really dive deeper (pun intended) in colour grading, dynamic KeyFrames, power windows panel, etc. I also find underwater videos quite different from land-based videos so most of the tutorials on YouTube are a bit hard to follow (land-based videos)

What would I like to achieve? I would go up a few levels from basic colour grading like what I have here of some manta rays.

I shoot with a Sony A7V, most of the time with slog3. Any recommendations welcomed!

Edited 21 hours ago21 hr by Paulkzk
Adding some camera specs

Hi Paul,

Honestly, the best starting point is right on the Blackmagic Design website. Their official training section has free dedicated video lessons just for the Color Page. You can even download the Colorist Guide PDF along with the original media files so you can practice on the exact same clips they use.

For YouTube channels that show real industry workflows:

Cullen Kelly or Darren Mostyn. their tutorials are very technical and professional. But if you need something a bit more accessible, Casey Faris is great for beginners and intermediate users.

But I agree with you, underwater color grading is indeed an entirely different discipline. Water acts as a massive cyan filter that selectively absorbs light.

Most generic underwater tutorials fail because they simply push the temperature slider towards orange. This breaks the image by introducing artificial color noise into channels that contain zero actual data.

When dealing with 10-bit Log files shot underwater, you have enough data depth to rebuild the image, but you need a specific approach rather than standard primary wheels.

Usually I get that magenta fringe while trying to remove the green. What happens is actually color math. Magenta is the exact opposite of green on the color wheel, so when you use the global tint slider to subtract the green, the software automatically pushes the entire image toward magenta. Because your underwater footage is already missing all that red information, this adjustment will not give you a neutral white balance. It just ends up turning your background water purple.

Another thing to keep in mind is that relying on the primary temperature and tint wheels will often just break the image. Instead, open the curves panel and use the Hue vs Hue curve. Select the specific green wavelength of the water and shift that point slightly toward blue. This changes the green cast into a standard water color without bleeding magenta into the rest of the frame.

You can also use the Color Warper for this, which lets you do really precise vector manipulation without messing up your global white balance. Just grab the control points in the green and cyan regions and pull them directly toward the blue region to neutralize the green.

Hope this helps.

Ciao

Wow! Thanks for the response Davide! I guess I'll have to dig into to the top-side tutorials to try learn and understand the basics of color grading and see how to apply that to underwater footages. What you mentioned with not using the standard primary wheel totally makes sense. I was wondering why my footages ended up with such crazy "noise" pixels and what you said makes sense. One thing that I feel like I'm missing though is using a red filter when shooting - do you use one or is it just me that I find "bringing back the reds" quite artificial because of the absence of it through the lens