Learn to colour correct and grade with our free course, DaVinci Resolve Colour Grading for Beginners. You’ll learn how to use each important tool in Resolve, including how to set up your project using scene cut detection, how to get clean skin tones with noise reduction, and how to create cinematic looks.

This colour grading tutorial looks at finishing off the look for your colour grade by making some targeted tweaks.

How to Dial in the Look for Your Colour Grade 

At this stage, you’ll have already made great headway with the look you’re after, but now you can start to play with the offset wheel and see if you want to do something like brighten up the footage, or make it a little moodier.

Don’t Clip Your Blacks

Keep an eye on your scopes, particularly Parade, and make sure you don’t clip your blacks while you’re making adjustments.

Fine-Tune Colour

In our example footage, there’s still a little too much red, so the Offset has just been nudged over to cyan a little to balance it out.

Rebalance Any Skin Tones

That’s made the overall colour better, but it’s also changed the skin tone. So back into the Skin node, we can then offset that by pulling Offset in the opposite direction.

Before and After

This is a good time to take stock. By following this DaVinci Resolve tutorial, you’ll have gone from a flat, lifeless image (and in the case of our example, very yellow!) to a vibrant piece of footage with good skin tones.

More Lessons From This Course

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial on colour grading in DaVinci Resolve. Here are some related DaVinci Resolve tutorials for you to explore.

• 

  How to Use Noise Reduction to Clean Up Skin Tones in DaVinci Resolve

  Learn to colour correct with our free course, DaVinci Resolve Colour Grading for Beginners. This lesson looks at using Resolve’s noise reduction tools to get…
• 

  A Quick Guide to the Layout in DaVinci Resolve 18, for Beginners

  In this lesson, you’ll see how the free video editing program DaVinci Resolve 18 looks when you open it up, and where you can find all the tools you’ll need.
• 

  How to Use Node-based Colour Grading in DaVinci Resolve

  Learn to colour correct like a pro with our free course DaVinci Resolve Colour Grading for Beginners. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to set up your nodes…
• 

  How to Use the Primaries Color Wheels in DaVinci Resolve

  Learn to colour correct like a pro with our free course DaVinci Resolve Colour Grading for Beginners. In this lesson you’ll learn all about the Primaries…

About the Authors

Tom Graham created the video course that includes this lesson. Tom is a multi-skilled content creator with a background in commercial filmmaking.  

Marie Gardiner wrote the text version of this lesson and it was edited and published by Jackson Couse.