If you’re new to color grading, it’s important to understand color management.
Color management is about setting up an image pipeline with technical transformations to make your image look correct. That means bringing it from your camera’s color space into your display color space. Corrections and grading happen in between.
Why use color management?
You save yourself some headaches by not reinventing the wheel. You don’t need to figure out how to correct footage V-Log into Rec-709. Let the software do that for you. So you can focus on making minor adjustments to get the look you like.
It also helps you to match different cameras and different sources more quickly.
And when you need to export for different deliverable formats and color spaces, you save more time.
Once I got a good handle on color management, I felt much more capable as a colorist.
In this video from Darren Mostyn, you’ll learn about:
- 00:00 Quick Intro
- 00:44 Footage analysis & Color Management Settings
- 01:25 No Color Management – Display Referred
- 02:35 DaVinci Resolve Color Management (RCM) First Setting & RAW
- 05:20 Handling non RAW / ProRes (6:22)
- 07:15 Handling many clips
- 07:55 Order of Operations
- 09:33 Changing Input & Output & automatic settings
- 10:52 Color Space Transform (CST)
- 14:11 My recommend setting for beginners
Gedaly is the Founder and Lead Educator of DVResolve.com and is Blackmagic Design Certified Master Trainer. He’s edited commercials for major brands and has done color & VFX for independent films. He consults on post-production workflow and creating online education. Gedaly is the co-founder of Working.Actor, a former marketing manager for large brands, and creates original film projects with his production company Razee.