Advanced Color Grading in DaVinci Resolve 17/18

This tutorial was designed for beginning to intermediate Resolve users who want to work faster while improving the look of their footage.

Using our provided projects, you’ll jump right in and begin color grading a wide variety of footage . You’ll learn the best approaches for setting the tonal range and contrast for each shot using color wheels and curves. You’ll also learn how to create a shot matching strategy that will make your grading sessions more disciplined and ultimately more productive.

Resolve’s numerous Qualifiers are a powerful way to isolate and perform targeted corrections on your images. One common use is sky replacement, and you’ll learn how to use a 3D qualifier in conjunction with Resolve 18’s new sky replacement effect to replace a dull sky with a more vibrant one.

With Magic Mask (Studio version only), elements such as faces, clothing, human bodies and even objects can be isolated using Resolve’s Neural Engine. You’ll learn how to combine Magic Mask with qualifiers for making selections that would otherwise be impossible to achieve in other grading applications.

Helping you work more efficiently in Resolve is a big focus of this tutorial. In this example, Mark shows you how to use Shared Nodes for the purpose of linking your grades to other clips so that when you make changes to one, all other clips that share that node receive your changes.