Color grading is an essential part of post-production that involves enhancing and stylizing the colors in video to achieve a specific look and feel. DaVinci Resolve by Blackmagic Design is one of the most powerful color grading software used by professional colorists and editors. In this comprehensive guide, we will walk through the basic concepts, tools, and techniques for color grading in DaVinci Resolve.
Understanding Color Grading
Color grading simply means altering and improving the color and luminance of the video. The goals of color grading include:
- Correcting color inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the footage
- Matching colors across different shots and angles for continuity
- Setting the overall mood, tone, and style through artistic color enhancements
- Drawing attention to certain elements and details in the frame
Color grading allows the colorist to set the look and feel of the visuals. It establishes consistency across the video and gives it a polished, cinematic style.
DaVinci Resolve Color Page Overview
DaVinci Resolve includes a dedicated Color page with advanced tools for color correction and grading. Here are the key sections of the Color page:
Viewer
This shows the frame at the current playhead position. You can split the viewer to compare shots, zoom in for detail, and enable overlays like waveforms.
Gallery
This contains all the clips, timelines, and stills available in your project. You can sort, search and organize them here.
Timeline
This is where you assemble shots sequentially into a timeline. You can add clips, trim, slide grade from one clip to another and more.
Nodes Editor
This shows the color correction nodes added to clips and timelines. Nodes apply color adjustments serially down the node tree.
Inspector
This contains all the tools, effects, and parameters for manipulating color and luminance. Key tools here include:
- Color Wheels: For adjusting luminance, saturation, and offsets
- Curve Palettes: For precise adjustments to hue, saturation, and luminance
- Qualifiers: To select and isolate colors for adjustment
- Power Windows: To limit effects to specific regions
Basic Color Correction in DaVinci Resolve
Color correction refers to fixing inconsistent or erroneous colors and bringing the footage to a baseline high quality before applying any creative enhancements. Here are some common color correction techniques:
Shot Matching
Matching clips shot in the same lighting and location is essential for continuity. You can match shots by:
- Sampling skin tones across shots with the color picker
- Measuring RGB values with scopes and matching them
- Balancing clips based on waveforms
- Copying grades from a hero shot with the Copy Grade function
Fixing Exposure Errors
You can fix underexposed or overexposed clips using:
- Lift/Gamma/Gain controls to adjust shadow, midtone and highlight areas
- Offset wheels to selectively lighten or darken RGB channels
- Curves to target and modify specific tonal regions
- Contrast and pivot adjustments to stretch contrast
White Balance
Incorrect white balance can be fixed by:
- Using the white balance picker to automatically neutralize white areas
- Manually adjusting the temperature and tint sliders
- Tuning individual RGB channels in the Offset wheels
- Limiting adjustments to focal points with Power Windows
Stylizing
Creative stylization techniques include:
- Adding film grain for texture
- Boosting saturation selectively with vectors
- Using Curves for contrast and color pops
- Applying LUTs for quick cinematic looks
Powerful Color Grading Tools in DaVinci Resolve
DaVinci Resolve offers sophisticated color wheels, curves, trackers, qualifiers, windows and more for advanced grading. Let’s explore some of these powerful tools:
HDR Grading and Color Management
DaVinci provides excellent HDR monitoring and grading tools for High Dynamic Range workflows including:
- Dedicated HDR palette with tone mapping and adjustments
- HDR capable waveform, parade and histogram scopes
- Support for Rec.2020, Rec.2100, HLG and PQ color science
- Ability to switch between SDR and HDR grading
Motion Tracking
The DaVinci tracker lets you track objects in motion to:
- Apply selective corrections to moving elements like vehicles, faces etc.
- Maintain corrections as an object moves and transforms
- Automate and speed up repetitive color fixes
- Improve compositing of CGI, graphics etc. over live footage
Qualifiers and Power Windows
Qualifiers let you precisely target a color range for isolation. Power Windows create shape masks to limit corrections. You can:
- Select skin tones, grass, skies etc. using HSL qualifiers
- Track qualifiers over moving objects
- Limit adjustments with circular, linear, polygon windows
- Create and track custom splines for complex masks
Node-Based Workflow
DaVinci uses a flexible node workflow allowing creative stacking of color processes including:
- Serial nodes for notch filters, balancing, matching etc.
- Parallel mixer nodes for blending multiple adjustments
- Splitter/combiner nodes for enhancing creative options
- Multi-level node trees for complex grades
Exporting and Delivery
After finishing grading, DaVinci provides all the exporting and delivery options you need:
- Render in source resolution or set custom output size
- Encode using high quality codecs like ProRes, DNxHR, H.264/H.265
- Add burn-ins like clip names, timecode etc.
- Export individual clips, timelines or full projects
- Deliver final video directly to platforms like YouTube, Frame.io
You can export regular Rec.709 SDR or HDR content in PQ/HLG formats suitable for any screen.
Conclusion
DaVinci Resolve offers extremely advanced color correction and grading capabilities rivalling dedicated hardware systems. Using its scopes, wheels, curves, windows, qualifiers, trackers, nodes and presets; you can achieve looks ranging from slight shot tweaks to radical filmic stylizations. With some practice and creativity, you can take your video content to new visual heights using DaVinci Resolve.
| Color Grading Stage | Key Tools in DaVinci Resolve |
|---|---|
| Shot Matching | Color picker, scopes, copy grade |
| Fixing Exposure | Lift/Gamma/Gain, offset wheels, curves |
| White Balance | Temperature slider, RGB offset wheels |
| Stylizing Look | LUTs, saturation vectors, film grain |
| HDR Grading | HDR palette, HDR scopes |
| Tracking | Built-in tracker, window tracking |
| Qualifiers | HSL qualifiers, power windows |
| Node Workflow | Serial, parallel, splitter nodes |
| Delivery | Render settings, direct uploads |