Using Texture Pop in DaVinci Resolve

In this video I'll guide you through the ins and outs of using Texture pop, including how to use Texture Pop as a three-dimensional tool to change the feel of skin and boost contrast, all while keeping your manipulation hidden from view.
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[@JimRobinson-colors]

I have used the texture pop OFX to enhance shadow detail in videos that are to uploaded to youTube. The slight enhancement of adjacent pixels in luma values tend to give the contrast you are referring to and youTubes compression will retain more detail from each frame and not just smooth out greys and black gradients of shadows. The skin treatment of smoothing - I agree with your comments but when doing beauty work, if I have to remove a blemish or a hard line with doing a power window and using negative mid-detail and blurring - there is no way sometimes to not smooth out the skin. In those cases I have developed a strategy to add a node and feed the key to it from the soft power window, then add film grain OFX and freeze the grain to bring back texture - if it is extreme I'll have it in a parallel node and feed another node with texture pop. The blends while zooming in at like 300% - you can play with and match the skin pores that you took out to remove the blemish/acne. I have also used texture pop to enhance moving water - it can give it more interest when the whitecaps are enhanced. I think people should be aware that texture pop or any texture needs to be done after any smoothing or blurring, because if you draw a window further up the node tree and place a power window and don't want it to look obvious, you will smooth out the inside or outside of the power window and it will make it more difficult to hide the window. I studied painting and how the masters used texture - and if you think of Texture in oil painting - the painter will do thin paint mixes on the canvas and then thicken up the paint and do texture on the canvas by the thick paint sitting on top. Not unusual is for a painter to, even in a simple landscape to just sketch out tree branches and flowers by applying a think broad texture on top. It's not discussed enough or used enough in my opinion. But when I see even a TV show that has a decent amount of texture in it - it can look beautiful and more 3d like than the usual treatments.

[@Crimbtw]

Helpful as always, Jim!

[@whoelse-if2br]

i fuck w this 👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽

[@zakariabouzidi8991]

your videos are of great value as always, thank you, i have been watching your videos for 6 months now, and I can tell you that my color grading has improved tremendously. Respect and gratitude

[@CullenKelly]

I'm so glad to hear that!

[@Skaggins]

Your first minute won my subscription. I'm a newbie with DR and so far, most of my color grading looks like it was color graded. I want my videos to look great without looking like I worked on them. Thanks!

[@azamat19]

Finding your channel was maybe one if the best things happened the last couple months haha. Awesome advices and really helpful. The color management has changed the game for me completely. Soon I'll buy your voyager pack. Im an pro audio engineer and i could totally relate to your words about saying having a vote. The customer always knows better ;)

[@cinema8564]

Your Top Tip: SEE the difference--perhaps by using the effect on/off button for the feature. So important to re-calibrate our eyes. Some guys (and girls) go to grey scale momentarily or look at a grey wall for a few minutes. Take a health break. For many of us, the image may well look different with one's re-calibrated eyeballs. Or new aspects of the image jump out then. (Love your 4K video display option!)

[@flochfitness]

What a fantastic demonstration of a powerful tool. Thanks!

[@joyKafka]

I am so glad to see you touch on different subjects like texture and camera characteristics. Your channel has become the only channel I turn to regularly or when I have a problem, after watching many others. It would be great if you do have the time to tell us more about all that we could face in colour grading in addition to colour grading itself. For example, whether or what should we do in advance or when filming considering the colour grading afterwards? Or how do you tackle different themes, lighting conditions, or transitions? Or in case of merging two or more shots together, is there a systematic approach to blend the two different tones, and so on an so forth. My examples might not be good enough but I believe you must know very well what challenges are there for us. Again thank you so much. Your videos helped me a great deal.

[@eydok5114]

You can also turn on the "Highlight Difference" mode in the highlight mode to see exactly which frequencies you are effecting.

[@Kaprygunov]

I love watching your videos and Daren Mostyn's on the same topic. You have different approaches and I like to compare and find out for myself what suits me best and how I can apply this or that tool. Thank you very much!

[@movie-trailer19]

It is insanely useful to know how to adjust the texture on the skin

[@ChadtheFilipino]

love texture pop, have used it predominantly in this application, but also a lot in food and beverage where i work half the time for product close-up and detailing, and also for extreme close-ups for narrative work/music videos where i want the detailing of a character or scene to punch more

[@user-ll9ln1uu4b]

Thank you, Cullen for your accurate apporoach for color grading. This is absolutely remarkable and outstanding!

[@dronyfilm]

One thing you really overlooked in this video, but that is quite crucial, is that you should actually never touch texture or any sorts of spatial tools within a parallel node setup. there is always the danger of creating artefacts because of the way a parallel node setup works in Resolve. spatial and temporal effects are always best to be applied in a serial setup, except you really know what you are doing and maybe even want the artefacts. To get an understanding of what I mean, simply add a blur node in parallel to a node that really decreases contrast. It's an extreme case, but it shows the halos you can create by working like that. Touching individual bands (especially with a tool, that is not really built that well tbh) can get you into even more trouble. The texture pop tool in general is in danger of creating halos quite easily anyway, so that's something you should be really mindful with.

[@dronyfilm]

@@CullenKelly yeah sure. Some tools work better in parallel, some don't. I mean, it's the beauty of resolve that it allows you to have multiple ways to work. On the other hand you need to think about a lot of stuff in order to not run into problems. looking forward to the update video. Thanks. - Sven

[@sashazephiria3869]

Super interesting topic to discuss ! I like how I can envision this as an alternative to face refinement OFX, because FR only works if it actually detects a full face :) I'll definitly give this technique a try ! I've been using Texture pop mainly on product commercials to pop the details of a specific object.

[@Saba_Demitri]

@Sasha Hope now you can realize how real colorists are humble in their teaching process & cover every major/minor topic that can help you to push your project to another level?! A real colorist never rushes to make Hollywood look, rather they prefer to teach color science.

[@jojjen69]

Hey sir, thanks a lot for your fantastic videos. Very educational! An idea I, a junior resolve user, tried out yesterday. It’s derived from the way I sharpen in photoshop. Set a node to LAB-color. Disable channel 2 and 3. Crank Mid/detail to taste. This way you get less weird artifacts. To my untrained eye it look more organic. Maybe this method also works for noise reduction (maybe disabling channel 1 instead). Have not tried that yet… It feels strange to give a colorist-oracle any type of tip, but maybe, maybe it’s useful…😅

[@FallHac]

Another exciting subject I've been wanting to know more about. Keep them coming and many thanks for your work!!

[@loudmotion5639]

Been using texture pop a lot to remove specularity of the skin too ;) or sometime enhancing old people to look older or younger lol. some of these portrait shots where you make people look more "mature" like they went through some hard stuffs in life haha.

[@slangdoll]

I hope to see more FX focused videos. Really cool! Show us GLOW, REFLECTIONS, LIGHT RAYS, HALATION, maybe even the super fun ANALOG DAMAGE :) :)

[@graemetowner7257]

as always, very nicely explained

[@ausdoug974]

Very interesting as always. Your videos make the learning process quite entertaining. Thank you. On a completely separate topic, the link to the free LUT resulted in a 404 error (file not found). Perhaps this error appears only in my browser, but if you have moved the file recently, the link may need to be updated.

[@suatsekil]

ohh www that is so strange no-one before mentioned this, thanks

[@ianharper6015]

Thanks for another helpful video. Do you still use the Texture Pop in the lower track of your node graph or would you place it elsewhere? Thanks.

[@leonardlevy8811]

What I noticed on the first example was how lowering rough and coarse helped with the bright shiny areas of the face ( I would call those overexposed areas) but the rest fo the face is fine. . That's what often bothers me the most , but it didn't help much on the last example . Do you have any suggestions or tutorials to deal with that especially if the camera side of things didn't use makeup.

[@castielvargastv7931]

Thr funny thing is that the dont do this left pic in the video thumbnail looks better to me😹

[@iCamSkiEz]

Another great video, I've been binging the channel! How are you having this node tree template saved? Sorry I'm new to colour grading!

[@takedowngaming9958]

Is this a viable tool for dealing with footage that looks digitally sharpened, like from a phone or drone?

[@dominic81634]

Good question. I'd like to know as well.

[@jaykellett7693]

SUBBED.

[@koushikbhattacharya832]

Thank u so much sir♥

[@acetheticVS]

Great Video! Btw, the links in your video caption seem to be dead. Any chance this is happening for anyone else?

[@devincorboy8638]

Thank you sir!

[@elcasanelles5806]

Is texture pop one of those modifiers that now you would not put anymore on your secondaries branch?

[@CullenKelly]

Hey! Great question. I would say, it depends on the context of the project. As stated in the video, sometimes you only need a little texture pop, and when you’re unsure if its too much, just cut it in half and see how it feels.

[@elcasanelles5806]

Thanks for taking the time to answer! But either I did not fully understand your answer or somehow managed to not make my question clear. On your clip trees, there are two branches, and if I'm not mistaken you noticed that things on the secondary branch that had to take into account adjacent pixels gave strange results and were best to be put downstream from where the branches meet. And I was wondering if texture pop is not one of those things. @@CullenKelly

[@frankinblackpool]

I enjoy watching your episodes however I really struggle trying to understand the concept of your unique "Node Tree" in comparison to your contemporaries and how they present their work on their channels. If I was to follow a traditional style of Node Tree, advocated by your contemporaries, would the "Texture Pop" node go towards the end of the Node Tree, or would you put it right at the start and develop your look from that point?

[@Saba_Demitri]

If you followed him correctly, a look is global when you work under scene-referred workflow. So does look will go at post group/timeline level whereas ofx are meant to go after primaries or parallel to primary at the clip level. Remember his post on insta on b/w (monochrome) look & inking process tutorial.

[@JimRobinson-colors]

hey Frank the answer is "Yes" once you set texture - you can do smoothing on top of the texture but the smoothening then is problematically hard to blend in. Film grain is kind of added texture. Most colorists add it at then end of a grading process, for that very reason. Even though there are a copule of youTubers that came up with the logic that film grain is in traditional film there from the start. In those old days nobody was then using power windows and smoothing techniques on top of it. So it's different now. Better to do blurs and smoothing first, then add texture for depth

[@frankinblackpool]

@@JimRobinson-colors Good evening Jim, I shall try to find a suitable project over the coming weeks where I can experiment with Texture Pop and I shall stick it towards the end of my Node Tree. Cheers. 😀

[@Slipsch]

Can't you just mask and track the face and "smoothen the skin"?

[@gokayk4885]

btw you'r underexposed

[@Bobsmithabc]

You almost talk like a normal person in this video

[@brmoogma]

nice