Color Grading in DaVinci Resolve

Knowledge Base

What You'll Learn

Master color grading in DaVinci Resolve or Adobe Premiere Pro. Learn the difference between color correction (fixing) and color grading (creative styling). Transform flat footage into cinematic masterpieces.

Color Correction vs. Grading

• Correction: Fix white balance, exposure, and contrast. Make footage technically correct.
• Grading: Add creative mood (warm, cool, desaturated, contrasty). Make footage look intentional and stylized.

Grading Workflow

1) Primary correction (white balance, exposure). 2) Secondary grading (shadows, midtones, highlights). 3) LUT application (optional base grade). 4) Power windows (selective color on specific areas). 5) Add grain or vignette.

Common Grading Styles

• Cinematic (Blue & Orange): Cool shadows, warm skin tones, high contrast.
• Vintage (Desaturated): Reduced saturation, slight color cast, slightly reduced contrast.
• High Contrast (Contrasty): Bright whites, deep blacks, saturated colors. Modern, punchy look.
• Flat (Reduced Contrast): Muted colors, soft shadows and highlights. Dreamy, ethereal.

Tools You'll Use

Curves: Adjust tone and color across full range.
Wheels: Offset color in shadows/mids/highlights.
Lift, Gamma, Gain: Adjust brightness in shadows/mids/highlights respectively.
Saturation: Overall or per-color intensity.

Where This Fits

This guide covers one specific part of mixing and colour. The wider picture. The full mix workflow from gain staging and balance through bus processing and knowing when to stop, is in Mixing a Full Song: From Rough Levels to Final Bounce, which frames the discipline as a whole and links out to the detailed guides underneath it, including this one. If you are starting from scratch rather than solving a specific problem, read that first and come back here.

Correction Comes Before Look, Always

The single most useful structural idea in grading is that it happens in two distinct stages, and collapsing them is why beginner grades look unstable across a scene.

Correction is technical. It brings every shot to a neutral, accurate starting point: correct exposure, correct white balance, black point where it belongs, and consistent contrast between shots that were meant to match. Correction has right answers, and two colourists doing it well will land in almost the same place.

Look is creative. It is the deliberate departure from neutral: the palette, the contrast curve, the warmth or coolness that carries the mood of the piece. Look has no right answer.

Doing them in the wrong order is what causes the classic problem where a look applied early falls apart on the next shot, because it was compensating for that shot's specific exposure error rather than expressing an intent. Correct everything first, confirm the scene matches with the look bypassed, and only then build on top.

This is also why a grade built shot by shot rarely holds together, and why colourists work across a whole scene before refining any single frame.

Use the Scopes, Not the Screen

Grading by eye is unreliable for reasons that have nothing to do with skill. Your monitor may be uncalibrated, the ambient light in the room shifts your perception, and your eyes adapt to whatever they have been looking at for the past ten minutes, which means the longer you grade, the further your judgement drifts.

The scopes do not adapt. Three are worth learning.

The waveform shows brightness across the frame, with the horizontal axis matching the picture. It is how you check that blacks sit at the bottom without crushing and highlights reach the top without clipping, and it is the fastest way to match exposure between two shots.

The parade splits that into red, green, and blue. When the three channels are misaligned in the shadows or highlights, you are looking at a colour cast, and correcting it is a matter of bringing them into line rather than guessing at a temperature slider.

The vectorscope shows hue and saturation. Its main practical use is skin tone, which falls along a consistent line regardless of the person, if skin sits off that line, something is wrong no matter how the image looks to you.

Primaries, Secondaries, and Working in Nodes

Grading operations fall into two categories, and knowing which one you need prevents most over-complicated node trees.

Primary corrections affect the whole image, lift, gamma, gain, overall saturation, contrast, temperature. This is where the majority of the work happens, and a large share of shots need nothing else.

Secondary corrections isolate part of the image: a specific hue, a brightness range, or a region defined by a shape or a tracked mask. Pulling a key on skin tone to warm faces without warming the entire frame is the canonical example.

Resolve structures this as a node graph rather than a stack of effects, and the useful discipline is one purpose per node. A node for balance, a node for contrast, a node for the look, a node for any secondary, labelled, so that when a shot is wrong you can bypass nodes individually to find which stage caused it.

The alternative, one node doing everything, is fast to build and nearly impossible to debug or reuse, which matters as soon as you are grading more than a handful of shots.

Matching Shots Is Most of the Job

Professional grading is mostly matching, not look design. A sequence cut from three cameras, or shot across a day as the light changed, will not intercut until the shots agree, and an audience notices mismatch immediately even when they cannot name it.

The workable method is to pick one shot as the reference, usually the one closest to what you want and with the most usable exposure, grade it properly, and then bring the others to it.

Match in a fixed order, using scopes rather than eyes: first the black point, then the white point, then overall brightness in the midtones, then colour balance, and only last saturation. Doing colour before exposure is why matching sometimes feels circular, changing brightness shifts apparent saturation, so the colour work has to be redone.

Split-screen comparison and Resolve's shot-match tools help, but the scopes remain the arbiter. Two shots whose waveforms and parades agree will intercut, whatever your adapted eyes are telling you after an hour in a dark room.

LUTs, Log, and What They Actually Do

Two things get treated as a shortcut to a look and are really neither.

Log footage is recorded with a flat, low-contrast curve specifically to retain highlight and shadow information that a standard profile would discard. It is not a look and is not meant to be viewed directly, flat, washed-out footage is log doing its job. It requires a conversion to a normal viewing range before any creative work makes sense, and it demands accurate exposure on set, since its latitude is spent protecting range rather than forgiving mistakes.

LUTs are lookup tables that map input colours to output colours. There are two genuinely different kinds and conflating them causes most LUT confusion. A technical or conversion LUT transforms log footage into a standard colour space. This is a necessary, correct operation. A creative LUT applies a stylistic look, and it was built against footage from a specific camera at a specific exposure.

That last point is why a creative LUT dropped onto uncorrected footage rarely looks like the preview. The LUT assumed a starting point your shot does not share. Correct first, apply the LUT to a corrected image, and treat it as a starting point to adjust rather than a finished grade.

Delivery: Colour Space, Monitoring, and Not Being Surprised

A grade that looked right in Resolve and looks wrong on the delivered file is nearly always a colour management problem rather than a grading one.

The core issue is that an image file carries numbers, and those numbers only mean a colour if something declares which colour space they are in. Deliver a file whose colour space is mislabelled or unflagged and every player will interpret it differently, which is exactly the "washed out on upload" complaint.

Set the project colour management deliberately rather than accepting defaults, know whether you are delivering standard-range or HDR, and confirm the output is tagged correctly.

Monitoring matters as much. A laptop screen at automatic brightness in a bright room is not a grading reference, and grading on it produces images that are consistently too dark or too contrasty elsewhere. You do not need a reference monitor to start, but you do need a screen at fixed brightness in consistent lighting, and you need to check the result on an ordinary phone and laptop before delivering.

The ACES and colour management guide covers the professional-tier version of this, where consistency has to hold across cameras, facilities, and delivery formats.

FAQ

Q: Should I grade in Log or Rec.709?
A: Grade in Log if available (more latitude). If shot in Rec.709, grade there directly.

Q: What is the difference between colour correction and colour grading?
A: Correction is technical: bringing every shot to a neutral, accurate baseline with correct exposure, white balance, and black point, so shots in a scene match. Grading is creative. The deliberate look built on top of that baseline. Correction has right answers. Grading does not. Doing them in that order is what makes a look hold together across a whole scene.

Q: Why does my LUT not look like the preview?
A: Because creative LUTs are built against footage from a specific camera at a specific exposure, and they assume that starting point. Applied to uncorrected footage they are mapping from somewhere the LUT did not expect. Correct the shot to a neutral baseline first, then apply the LUT, and treat the result as a starting point to adjust rather than a finished grade.

Q: Do I need a calibrated reference monitor to start grading?
A: Not to start, but you do need consistency: a screen at a fixed brightness in consistent room lighting, and the discipline to judge by scopes rather than by eye. Automatic brightness and a changing room are what produce grades that look wrong everywhere else. Check your result on an ordinary phone and laptop before delivering.

Q: Should I grade every shot individually?
A: Grade the scene, not the shot. Pick a reference shot, grade it properly, then match the others to it, black point, white point, midtone brightness, colour balance, saturation, in that order. Grading shots in isolation produces sequences that do not intercut, because the eye adapts within seconds and what registers is the change at each cut.