For those Unfamiliar…
I first heard about Jacob’s Ladder from the colorist newsletter. If you want to read up on it, here’s a link to the original post. The short of it, is that it’s a template to let you use verses curves for the LAB color space. It splits off each channel and sets up a curve against all other channels. The results are very interesting and take some getting used to, but it’s an interesting way to approach a look and offers results that would be difficult to achieve otherwise. While you could always do take a different approach to adding green to just the blues or yellow to just the brightest parts, using the curves this way offers a much more natural look in my opinion. There is one thing about Jacob’s Ladder though that keeps it from being its best…
The Problem
Jacob’s Ladder uses the blend modes that require the image to be 50% gray in order for there to be no change in the image. This means the grade needs to start out with all nodes at 50% and the the curve can be manipulated to add the changes. The problem is resolve has no easy way of getting the curve to 50%. The template provided on Cote’s blog gets pretty close to 50%, but that’s after a lot of messing around. What’s worse, if you make changes and want to start back over, you have to copy and paste nodes that have that 50% curve already. What a hassle!
The Solution
The problem is that Resolve has no easy control in the curves to get to 50%, but we don’t need the curves at 50%. We only need the image to reach 50% as a starting point. Resolve has one easy way to do this, the contrast slider. If we set the contrast to 0 on each node, the image becomes a perfect middle gray and no difference happens when the template is applied. The problem is that then the curves only have the one shade to work with. So if we set up two parallel nodes, one with contrast set to 0 and the other for our curves, we can not only start our grade from completely neutral, but also easily reset the curves!
Now the obvious problem is that we’ve nearly doubled the amount of nodes that this technique requires, so I would recommend only enabling the nodes you’re using for the sake of processing. Nevertheless, I think it’s a worthwhile addition for those wanting to make sure that they start from a perfect neutral before grading the look.