The curves family

IntermediateDuration ~15 min video + 45 min hands-onTools DaVinci Resolve (free)

Why this lesson

You’ve balanced a shot and it’s correct — but the yellows feel a touch cold, the greens run into the browns, and reaching for the primaries would drag your hard-won balance right back out of place. That’s the gap the curves family fills. Curves let you change one hue, or one brightness zone, without touching anything else — and because they present every move as a gentle line on a graph, they nudge you toward subtle, professional adjustments instead of the heavy-handed ones a wheel invites. The catch is that the tool most colorists find most confusing, hue-vs-hue, is exactly the one that unlocks the rest. This lesson clears that up, then shows you the small, specific moves the pros actually make.

Watch

Watch for: Kelly opens by explaining why this graph confuses people — both axes are Hue, so the curve wraps in a circle like the vectorscope. Watch his four worked shots: shot 2, a 2–3° warming of the yellows that leaves his hard-won balance completely untouched; shot 3, rotating the greens ~20–30° away from a brownish forest floor to build separation you can see appear in the vectorscope; shot 4, a whole palette refined hue by hue. Note the recurring craft: presets drop the goalposts too wide (choke them in), the eyedropper drops them too narrow (widen out), and he always double-clicks the goalpost fields and types 0 into Hue-rotate so only his target hue moves. Watch the histogram underlay too — tall means there's color to grab, flat means the tool has nothing to bite into.

The explainer

The curves palette is a whole family of tools sharing one idea: drag a line on a graph to remap one image attribute against another. Start with the one you half-know. The plain custom (luma) curve maps input brightness to output brightness — lift a point and the tones beneath it brighten. Daria’s log-restore demo in the color-management supplement is the clearest proof of how literal that is: she crushes the blacks, then rescues them by lifting a point near the black end of the curve, not the middle, because the middle targets the gamma range while the shadows live at the bottom.

The rest of the family is where this lesson lives: the hue-vs curves. Kelly’s whole video is about the trickiest of them, hue-vs-hue, and his opening point unlocks it: both axes are Hue. Left to right you travel red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, magenta and back to red; top to bottom is hue as well. Because hue runs in a circle — which is exactly why the vectorscope is a circle — the curve wraps: hit the right edge and you loop back to the left. Bracket a range of hues with goalpost control points, grab the point between them, and you rotate those hues toward a neighbour. Watch how Kelly narrows a preset’s goalposts (presets run wide) or widens an eyedropper selection (the eyedropper runs narrow), and how he types an explicit 0 into the goalpost fields so the edges rotate nothing and only his target hue moves.

Two sibling curves work the same way on different properties. Hue-vs-sat saturates or desaturates a chosen hue; hue-vs-lum brightens or darkens it. George’s skin masterclass shows all three on faces in the supplement, plus a fourth move worth stealing: when hue-vs-lum turns ugly, switch to the sat-vs-sat curve and pull down only the most saturated pixels of the skin to kill hot-spot blotches in an ear or a red patch.

Then there’s lum-vs-sat, which sets saturation by brightness rather than by hue. Its bread-and-butter use is pulling saturation out of the very brightest and very darkest zones, so blown highlights and deep shadows read clean and neutral instead of carrying a tint.

Above all this lesson is about intent. Kelly’s pro applications are almost all tiny: warming yellows two or three degrees to cue a filmic look, or rotating greens a touch toward pure green to separate foliage from a brownish forest floor. The naive version — one control point dragged hard — is identical to just spinning the Hue knob in your primaries; the point of the curve is confinement, changing one hue without disturbing your balance. He leans on the histogram underlay to see where there’s actually color to grab: tall means image to move, flat means nothing to bite into.

Finally, know the modern alternative. Daria’s Color Warper (in the supplement) makes the same targeted hue/sat/lum moves on a warpable grid instead of separate 2D curves — you click a color in the viewer and drag to rotate hue and change saturation at the same time, with points auto-pinning so untouched regions stay put. Same intent, different interface; pick whichever lets you make the small, specific move the shot needs.

Do it

1. On a balanced shot, add a serial node after your balance node and open the Curves palette. Switch to Hue vs Hue.
2. Grab the Yellow preset to drop goalposts, then choke the left and right goalposts in so you’re sitting only on yellow. Double-click each goalpost’s Hue Rotate field and type 0.
3. Grab the middle point and rotate the yellows about 2–3° warmer. Toggle the node off/on: only the yellows should move — neutrals and other hues stay put.
4. Now try the eyedropper route instead. Click-drag on a green in the frame to set goalposts, then widen them (the eyedropper runs narrow). Pull the middle point toward pure green to separate the greens from any browns, and watch the two colors spread apart on the vectorscope.
5. Switch to Hue vs Sat, then Hue vs Lum, on a shot with a face. Make one small move on each. If a hot spot flares, open the Sat vs Sat curve and pull the most-saturated point down to clean it.
6. Open Lum vs Sat and pull saturation out of the brightest and darkest ends. Confirm the highlights and shadows read cleaner.
7. Optional: open the Color Warper, click a color in the viewer, and make one of those same moves by dragging on the grid instead. Same result, different feel.

Secondaries & curves recipes — curves quick reference (hue-vs-hue/sat/lum, sat-vs-sat, lum-vs-sat)secondaries-recipes.pdf109 KBOriginal course material — free to useLevel 2 workbook — every Do it exercise, 2.1–2.12, plus the capstone (printable)level-2-workbook.pdf799 KBOriginal course material — free to use

Terms introduced

Terms introduced in this lesson

• Curves
• Hue-vs curves (HSL curves)
• Lum-vs-sat curve

Each term links to the glossary, where it is defined by the way you just used it.

Check

Check yourself

1. On the hue-vs-hue curve, why does the graph wrap around — hit the right edge and you loop back to the left?

   Because the curve is showing luminanceBecause the footage is logBecause the vertical axis is saturationBecause both axes are Hue, and hue runs in a circle like the vectorscope

2. You drop the Yellow preset's goalposts around your target hue and rotate the middle point. What should the two goalpost control points be doing?

   Rotating the same amount as the middle pointTurned into editable splinesSet as wide as the whole curveSitting at a hue-rotate of zero, so only your target hue moves and neighbouring hues stay put

3. What does the lum-vs-sat curve let you do?

   Convert the image to black and whiteSet saturation according to brightness — for example, pull saturation out of the brightest and darkest zones so they read cleanTrack a power windowRotate one hue toward a neighbour

4. Kelly's guiding principle for using hue-vs-hue in pro work is best summed up as:

   Small, specific rotations that refine color without forcing you to re-balance the shotSet the histogram to Output and chase itAlways use the editable-spline modeOne big control-point move does the most good

Check answers

You can move on when you can… pick one hue in a balanced shot and rotate it a few degrees with hue-vs-hue — goalposts choked in and zeroed — without your neutrals or your balance shifting, and say which of hue-vs-sat, hue-vs-lum, sat-vs-sat or lum-vs-sat you’d reach for to fix a given problem.

Mark this lesson complete

Go deeper

Daria — Advanced Resolve: the Color Warper (segment): the grid-based alternative to the HSL curves, doing the same targeted hue/sat/lum work in one interface.

Segment: 41:16–46:36 — Color Warper vs HSL curveswatch full video

Watch for: Daria drives the Color Warper — a grid where you click a color in the viewer and drag to change hue and saturation at once, instead of hopping between two separate 2D HSL curves. Watch how points auto-pin so an untouched region (the sky) stays put while she warps a neighbour (the mountains), and how raising the ring/column divisions to 12 buys precision. Same targeted intent as the HSL curves, newer interface.

George — Skin Tones Masterclass (HSL-curves segment): all three hue-vs curves applied to skin, plus the sat-vs-sat trick for cleaning hot spots — a preview of 2.6.

Segment: 23:08–30:18 — HSL curves on skin (hue-vs-hue/sat/lum, sat-vs-sat)watch full video

Watch for: George applies all three HSL curves to skin — hue-vs-hue to even the skin hue, hue-vs-sat for saturation, hue-vs-lum for brightness — holding Shift to set anchors without any rotation, and keeping the boundary anchors wide for smoother selections on 8-bit footage. Watch the sat-vs-sat trick at the end: pulling down only the most-saturated skin pixels to clean hot spots in an ear or a red blotch, where hue-vs-lum would turn ugly.

Next up: 2.6 · Skin tone — where the same curves, plus a clean qualifier, meet the one memory color the audience judges hardest.