Color Grading in Davinci the queen’s gambit

Welcome everyone, today we’re going to go over how to color grade your videos with DaVinci Resolve using the Queens Gambit TV Series as reference. This popular Netflix series is available to watch right now. It sheds SOME light on the Cost of Genius. This iconic series is a cinematographer’s dream. We’re not only going to walk your through the color grade, we’re going to give you the Power Grade! That means you can import this same color grade and get the same exact look with the same exact node tree setup in a matter of seconds! This will save you time with editing and get straight to the fun! 

Now, if that power grade sounds like something you’re interested in, stick til the end so you can see how you can pick that up. In order to better understand which direction we need to push the image and which direction to take it, let’s figure out what camera it was shot on. After doing some research, it goes to show that Red takes the cake on this one. We thought Arie would be the first choice however, it looks like the Red Ranger is the camera they used to film The Queen’s Gambit with Zeiss glass. 

After learning which camera the queen’s gambit was shot on, we were able to take our BMPCC 6K and set up a nice game of chess. Being chess enthusiasts, we wanted to do it justice. We set up five lights around the chess board, took our BMPCC with our cinema Zeiss glass, the 85mm as well as the Sigma 40mm, we were able to capture images that just came out perfect, and now that we know what camera it was shot on, what lenses were used and we filmed our own clips with our Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera and our own Zeiss glass, it’s time to start grading. The first step to recreating any look is to identify the Color Story. So, pull up a reference clip from the film that you want to match. In DaVinci, Option ’S’ will pull up a node that will allow you to pull up your effects (top right Open FX) and drag and drop the color palette right onto your node. 

Now that we have our color palette on our node, it’s time to inspect our color story. For The Queen’s Gambit TV series, we have a lot of salmon in the highlights and midtowns and you will notice there are no black points or white points. It appears they went for a cashew/almond style color grade. Now, we still need to inspect with our scopes. Looking at the luma levels we noticed they went for a more natural CONTRAST and definitely pushed a lot of red into their image. On the vector-scope you will notice the salmon tints being pushed into the highlights and into the lower parts of the shadows hold a more burgundy color with reds and browns. 

Now that we know the color story and we’ve taken a closer examination of the waveforms and the scopes it’s time to begin color grading. Follow along step by step on Cody Scott’s Youtube:

We’ll pull the reference image next to the clip we want to edit to get a better read on data. At the top left corner in Davinci, click the middle icon go over to the dropdown labeled ‘CURRENT GROUP’ and click ‘selected still images’. This pulls your reference clip and your actual clip next to each other so you can have the most accurate read. Looking at the Parade scopes on the bottom right of Davinci Resolve, you’ll notice the distinct difference between the reference scope and the image you’re looking to match. Whatever side your reference is on will be the side you look to in the levels. 

We begin with a node tree, laying this out in advance could save you time in the end. This is how we build our node trees. First, we always choose Noise Reduction. Next up will be HDR where the image will come to life. Color is our third node followed by Contrast and Exposure on the fourth node. Once these are made, let’s make some parallel nodes. Clean Shadows are on top, below it you have the skin, below that is the clean white because we want to make sure they stay completely clean as we see in Beth Harmon’s eyes. Below this we will add the dress. In order to make these pop while matching the tone of our reference, we’ll key each of these individually.

Next we add a Look Adjustment node, after which it’s only appropriate to add a bit of Pop. Next we’ll work on a Vignette to make it more dramatic, Sharpen up the image, and finish off with some Film Grain. Our node tree is now built and everything is properly organized and labeled, it’s time to BEGIN!

( The order in which you attack these are important, watch the tutorial to see exactly what we did. )

Noise Reduction cleaned up the shadows and then moved to Contrast to match up our contrast with the image. We then move to Color to pump color into the image so everything is looking nice and neutral. After this we enhance the color with HDR and THAT is what really put us in the era we’re striving for. We move into Cleaning up the Shadows by removing the color from just the darkest parts of the image. After that, we adjusted and softened the skin tones and pushed yellow to remove the pink. We Cleaned up the Whites in the skin and, again, removed colors just from the whites so it can look nice and diffused. Once we finish with these we touched up our dress trying to really put it in the world of The Queen’s Gambit, that old vintage red film look.

After the dress is looking nice, we THEN move to our Look Adjustment, this is where we subtly pushed the image towards that Queen’s Gambit look, that vintage rustic look. Then we pop it off the page with some curves and a GLOW effect. To make things more balanced we add a vignette around the edges. Once we did that, we add the Sharpening and some Film Grain to add noise back into the shadows setting it to the desired era. 

There you have it, thanks for following along! If you’re a commercial videographer and you want to learn how to land higher paying clients by simply getting a higher quality look out of your color grades, you’ll want to watch this video next breaking down how we color grade our commercials and the commercial interviews we are hired to film. By enhancing our quality we’ve been able to grow a six figure business in less than 6 months!