Color Grading with Da Vinci Resolve: Beginner to Advanced

Behind the Blackmagic

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 one of these projects to achieve professional 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!