DaVinci Resolve — Primary Corrections
Color grading is the process of adjusting the color and contrast of a film's footage to create the intended visual look, ensure consistency across shots, and enhance the story's emotional tone. DaVinci Resolve is the industry-standard color grading software, used on virtually every major theatrical film and streaming series. The primary correction tools control the overall image: Lift (shadows): adjusts the darkest tones of the image. Raising lift brightens black levels, creating a faded/milky look; lowering lift deepens blacks for contrast and richness. Gamma (midtones): adjusts the middle tonal range — the most visually significant adjustment for skin tones, sky values, and overall image brightness. Gain (highlights): adjusts the brightest tones. The lift/gamma/gain controls in DaVinci present as color wheels — a circular control where the center is neutral and moving toward a color adds that hue to that tonal range. Adding blue to the shadows (moving lift toward blue) and orange to the midtones (moving gamma toward orange) creates the warm-shadows-cool-highlights complementary contrast look of modern cinema. Offset shifts all tonal ranges simultaneously — useful for adjusting overall exposure. Contrast, pivot, and saturation are companion controls: Contrast expands the tonal range around the Pivot point; Saturation scales all color values simultaneously (pulling saturation to zero produces black and white). Log footage (camera raw format) captures a wider dynamic range than the final display and must be balanced to a display color space before grading — Log footage appears flat and desaturated until corrected.