Color Grading with Da Vinci Resolve: Beginner to Advanced

Color grading still enjoys an odd, almost mystical status among some filmmakers, but what if I told you that you can do it with software that you can get for free?  Well, there’s no magic (Blackmagic doesn’t count) here, just hard graft and know-how.  This course will take you from a standing start, right the way through to high-end and professional color grading using the excellent post-production solution; Da Vinci Resolve.  The training material I’m providing comes from real-world projects where I was paid to provide my labor.  I’m going to take you through how I approached each and every one of these projects to achieve professional, high-end results.

On this course, you will learn:

The full Da Vinci Resolve workflow, from receiving a project right through to final delivery

Primary grading tools which work on the entire image

Secondary grading tools which allow you to make highly accurate corrections to your image

Keying, tracking and rotoscoping in the color panel

The parallel and layer mixer nodes, and when to use them

Best practices for large and complex projects

Tips and tricks to deal with challenging footage

Da Vinci Resolve color management, including LUTs and camera RAW decoding

Da Vinci Resolve’s OpenFX plugins, including the Beauty and film grain plugins

How to make your footage sing and deliver a project professionally, every time

And much, much more!

I’m now a Blackmagic Design certified trainer in Da Vinci Resolve, and I’ve been color grading professionally for over nine years.  In that time I’ve produced work for brands such as Unilever, Greggs Bakery, TNT Logistics, Joules (a UK clothing line), the NHS, the BBC and Virgin Airlines.  It doesn’t stop there, either.  I’ve delivered drama and factual work for broadcast and web, as well as feature films for international distribution.

Missing a mentor?

I’m bringing the benefit of my experience to this course because I know what it’s like to have no-one to teach you.  When I started to grade on my film course back in university, there were no tutors who could teach me to grade at all.  I wound up spending long nights in the grading suite (some winter days I actually missed the sun completely) teaching myself to use Resolve from scratch.  It paid off as I wound up delivering grading work for the BBC wildlife unit, on the project that became Life Stories, whilst still studying at university!  But why was it like that?  I still believe I’d be a lot better now if I’d had the right training earlier, all the harder to iron out bad habits when there’s no-one around to call you out!

So this course is my attempt to provide that support and that training to as many people as possible, all for the price of a pizza (a heavily discounted pizza if it’s a large one).  If you want to learn how to finish your film projects to a higher standard, then come along as we cover Da Vinci Resolve in Depth in this course!

The Edit Panel
2 lectures • 7min

The Conform: Getting a project into Resolve
12 lectures • 1hr 4min

The Scopes
5 lectures • 35min

Primary grades
10 lectures • 1hr 24min

Secondary grades
14 lectures • 2hr 23min

The dreaded Tech Part 1: the Basics
4 lectures • 11min

Basic delivery for web
5 lectures • 22min

Real world project 1: Corporate video
8 lectures • 4hr 35min

Module 10: Lookup Tables (LUTs) and the Magic Mask
4 lectures • 27min

Module 11: grading a music video
7 lectures • 5hr 4min

Module 12: Intermediate node Tree and more magic masks
7 lectures • 57min

Module 13: The Feature Film Scene
9 lectures • 4hr 5min

RED
3 lectures • 17min

The Full Short Film
4 lectures • 3hr

Colour Space and Gamma
3 lectures • 12min

Advanced Node Tree
10 lectures • 1hr 35min

Color Management
5 lectures • 27min

The Adds
5 lectures • 4hr 57min

Building a workstation
8 lectures • 37min