Insider Tips: Getting Better Results with Resolve’s Qualifier

Every week, Frame.io Insider asks one of our expert contributors to share a tip, tool, or technique that they use all the time and couldn’t live without. This week, Rafael Bernabeu Parreño looks at how you can get better information from Resolve’s Qualifier tool.

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Using color spaces to get better Qualifier results

One of the most overlooked tools in Resolve is the RGB Qualifier. At first glance, it’s a crude tool with RGB selections offering a less intuitive values compared to the HSL Qualifier,

But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can use a concatenation of Color Space Transforms to make selections in the color space you want, instead.

For example, if we change our space to Lab (CIE) and perform a qualifier before returning to RGB, the RGB qualifier will turn into one that uses the red channel as L, green as a, and blue as b. With this method, we then perform a customized qualifier in this color space, which isn’t achievable using, for example, the 3D qualifier.

Another use of traveling between color spaces is simply to find parameters that are easier to access in other spaces. An example of this is how saturation in logarithmic color spaces can be a cumbersome parameter to select, as it’s highly compressed. This makes it hard for the HSL qualifier is to cleanly select those values.

A more intuitive solution for this is to use a REC709/Linear color space and gamma to separate the saturation values as much as possible, creating a cleaner selection.

REC709/Linear and Lab are just a couple of options available for color selections in Resolve. However, I encourage you to explore and experiment with other color spaces and techniques to find clearer results. These are the options I use most often, but other models can also yield interesting results in a more intuitive way than the 3D qualifier.