For thirty years, DaVinci has pioneered the development of color correction hardware and software
designed to enhance visual images acquired from film and video. DaVinci Resolve 9 is our newest
and most evolved professional color correction application yet. However, for all its technological
sophistication, Resolve is merely a tool that requires the hands of a skilled artist to realize its full
potential.
Subsequent chapters of this user manual cover the DaVinci Resolve toolset in great detail, but
before getting into the specifics of color balancing and contrast adjustment, Power Windows and
Custom Curves, it’s important to step back and consider what these tools are for, and why you’re
learning to use this application in the first place.
This preface is for those of you who are new to this process we call color correction, or color grading.
If you’re a veteran colorist then you might want to skip ahead, but if you’re just starting out, the
following sections are intended to describe the many goals of color correction, and how the DaVinci
Resolve toolset has been designed to address them; making it fast and efficient to alter images in
innumerable ways as we elevate raw footage to cinematic art.

The Goals of Color Correction
If reality is a firehose of visual information, then digital cinema and broadcast would be represented
by a garden hose. Color correction, therefore, could be considered the process of choosing which
parts of the firehose of raw image data to fit into the garden hose of our displays in order to create
a pleasing image for the viewer.

Maximizing the Look of Your Media
Clearly, the most fundamental aspect of the color correction process is that of making every clip
look its best. While the job of the cinematographer is to light and expose the image with an artistic
intent, your job is to realize this intent by making adjustments to the color and contrast of the
image, so that the final result is as close to what the director and cinematographer had in mind as
is humanly possible. In the process, you have the opportunity to overcome inconsistencies with
exposure and white balance that were, for various reasons, unavoidable. Furthermore, you can
make subtle adjustments to add warmth or contrast that was not available during the shoot, but
that the cinematographer would have liked.
The Art of Color Correction
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THE ART OF COLOR CORRECTION
Increasingly, color correction is seen as a critical stage in the postproduction process. For example,
the newer generation of digital cinema cameras are capable of shooting raw colorspace image
data, or RGB image data with a log exposure, in order to preserve the maximum amount of image
data for manipulation during the color correction process. However, when you acquire image data
this way, it must be transformed into a viewable image via color correction in the same way that film
negative must first be developed and printed to positive film.

Of course, there are also situations in which you may find it necessary to attempt to fix source
media with far more substantial problems in color and exposure. In these cases, the tools exist to
make far more involved adjustments to the image; however, the quality of your results will depend
heavily on the data-quality and “latitude” of your source media. For example, ARRI ALEXA and RED
EPIC cameras record quite a bit of image data, making extreme corrections far more possible then
more heavily compressed camera formats such as the Canon 5D. However, in either case, Resolve
provides the tools to process images in many different ways to adjust the image for a better look.

Whether clips need changes large or small, the primary DaVinci Resolve toolset adjusts the
characteristics of hue, saturation, and contrast in a variety of ways. Color balance wheels in the 3 way
color palette let you adjust all three color channels at once, altering the color temperature of the
scene at specific ranges of tonal detail referred to as lift, gamma, and gain. Alternately, the sliderbased
interface of the primaries palette lets you make the same kinds of controls via independently
adjustable red, green, and blue lift, gamma, and gain controls.

Primary correction bars

All of these controls let you adjust the color tone of the shadows independently from that found in
the brightest highlights of an image.

Separate saturation controls let you increase or decrease color intensity throughout the scene.

All of these controls, which are essential to the color correction process, are described in Chapter 6,
“Color Controls.”
Emphasizing What’s Important
Another important aspect of the color correction process is the ability to make adjustments to
emphasize or de-emphasize specific elements within the frame. It’s similar in concept to equalization
in audio mixing, in that you’re choosing which color values to boost or suppress using a variety of
techniques.
This can be done to direct the viewer’s gaze, for example by surrounding a specific part of the
image with a Power Window, which lets you restrict specific adjustments made to the inside and
outside of the Window’s shape.

Area outside the window darkened and desaturated

Specific alterations can also be made to prevent audience distraction. For example, a low-saturation
monochromatic tint may be a pleasing look overall, but in the soft wash of color, the viewer might
lose track of the watch that’s preoccupying the protagonist. Using tools such as the Hue Curves
and HSL Qualifier, you can quickly and easily tune the color of the woman’s hands and of the watch
to guide the viewer’s eye, and bring some needed depth to the scene.

Audience Expectations
There is another family of tools, the HSL, RGB, and Luma Qualifiers, that provide even more specific
control, and they’re useful for adjusting ranges of color to either play into or against the audience
expectations for color in a scene. Substantial research into what has been termed “memory color”
shows that people have finely tuned expectations for the hues of particular subjects, such as
flesh tone, foliage greens, and sky blues. Deviation from these expectations can create a sense of
something being not quite right, which can be either detrimental or beneficial, depending on your
goals for a particular scene.
HSL Qualification is effectively a chroma keyer, that lets you sample the image to create a key that’s
used to define where to apply a specific correction. For example, if you’re happy with the rest of the
image but the skin tone of the actor has an unhealthy green tinge to it as a result, you can isolate
the color of that actor’s skin and adjust it to a healthier hue.

Another common example is the adjustment of skies. If you’re aiming for a gorgeous summer day, a
washed out sky in the source media can be a bit of a bummer. However, using qualification it’s easy
to isolate that wedge of blue, then push and pull it into just the right amount of summertime joy.

Balancing Scenes
It’s rare when the uncorrected shots of a scene match one another perfectly. Even the most carefully
exposed angles of coverage can have small variances that need to be evened out. On the other end
of the spectrum, run-and-gun programs using available light often result in edited scenes with huge
changes in lighting and color as each shot cuts away to the next.