What Makes the HDR Palette Special?

‌What Makes the HDR Palette Special?‌

Before diving into the detailed use of the HDR palette’s controls, it’s important to understand a bit more about how the HDR palette processes image data, so you can better understand what advantages this tool presents.

Using the HDR Palette Without Color Management

While the HDR palette has been designed to work hand in hand with color management, you can use it in non-color managed workflows so long as you set it up correctly. The HDR palette option menu has Color Space and Gamma submenus that let you specify how you want to work. By default, both submenus are set to “Timeline” to reflect the color space you’re choosing to work within in display- referred workflows.

Color Space Aware Controls When Using Color Management

The HDR palette really shines when you enable Resolve Color Management or ACES, because it’s a color space aware palette that uses color management to full advantage. Being color space aware means that the color and contrast controls of the HDR palette conform themselves to the range of each clip’s image data as mapped from the Input Color Space assigned to the source clip to the Timeline Color Space your program is working within. Practically, this provides two benefits:

— The controls of the HDR palette work and feel virtually identical no matter what type of source clip you’re adjusting, and no matter which timeline color space you’re choosing to work within.

NOTE: Because the HDR palette is color space aware, it’s not necessary to enable the HDR setting on nodes for controls to work intuitively while working within a wide gamut Timeline Color Space, or delivering to an HDR format like ST.2084. The HDR palette takes care of this for you, automatically.

— HDR palette adjustments made to one type of media will have a similar result when copied to other types of media. This makes makes matching shots and copying looks from one type of media to another easier than with previous tools.

Perceptually Uniform Adjustments

Furthermore, the image data of each clip is converted from the Timeline Color Space to an operational color space used by the HDR palette, where the image is adjusted and then converted back to the Timeline Color Space again, ready for the next operation. The operational color space that’s used by the HDR palette is perceptually uniform, which means that the range of values corresponding to each visible hue are distributed evenly throughout this color space.

While the HDR palette works well grading standard dynamic range (SDR) material, the underlying color science used by this palette also addresses issues that have inconvenienced colorists grading high dynamic range programs using traditional controls. These benefits include:

— Since the controls of this palette calculate all color transformations within a perceptually uniform color space, you will experience finer control over color adjustments in a more photographically intuitive way. For example, you may find that yellow hues are easier to grade within this palette, since there’s a more even distribution of hues around the circumference of the color wheels.

— The HDR palette lets you make contrast adjustments without altering image saturation, meaning that unlike when you use the master wheels of the Lift, Gamma, and Gain panel, the HDR palette lets you raise image contrast without increasing image saturation, and lower image contrast without decreasing image saturation. You’ll find this is particularly useful while boosting highlights in HDR grades, since you can now do so without causing extreme saturation increases in your highlights. In fact, all adjustments you make to contrast with these controls will adjust the

image while keeping saturation unerringly constant (that is to say, perceptually speaking; you will in fact notice small saturation changes in the Vectorscope). This, of course, excludes the saturation controls.

— The HDR palette’s deep integration with Resolve Color Management also makes matching shots and copying looks from one type of media to another easier than with previous tools. Whether you’re a professional, or just getting started with color, the HDR palette will enable better results with less hassle.

Superior Temp and Tint Controls

Because the HDR palette is color space aware, the Temperature and Tint adjustments in this palette are themselves made using the same kind of XYZ to LMS color space transform used by the Chromatic Adaptation Resolve FX plugin. The result is that Temp adjustments are photometrically accurate and create visual results similar to how the human vision system perceives changes to a scene due to a change in the color temperature of lighting.

Customizable Zones

Another unique aspect of the HDR palette is how it can be customized to suit a wide variety of working styles, specific tasks, and colorist preferences. Switching to the Zones panel reveals an interface for adjusting the Range and Falloff of each currently defined zone, using graphical controls overlaid

onto a histogram of the current image, while a curve shows the user how the contrast and color adjustments they’ve made mathematically affect the RGB channels of the image within each zone. While the default zones preset provides an efficient starting point for many kinds of scenes, the varying tonal range of image data in different scenes, whether daytime, nighttime, interior, or exterior, will often require you to customize these zones to get the best results from adjustments using

these controls.

The Zones panel lets you customize the tonal ranges that each set of zone controls affect.

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