I use the same criteria for this every time, and that’s to optimize my skin tone and maximize my color separation. If you don’t then you’ll probably end up having to go back to that balance node and recalibrating to get a proper starting point. So before you think about adding saturation into the image, you need to revisit your balance node and make sure that you’re completely happy with it. “Balance starts to become really critical when you’re manipulating the saturation of an image.” The first thing that I want to emphasize before I even begin looking at how I’m going to introduce saturation into the image, is that balance starts to become really critical when you’re manipulating the saturation of an image-especially when you’re increasing saturation.Įssentially, if you have a small imbalance in your shot-like it’s a little too red or too green-that imbalance is going to become exaggerated as you start to add color into the image. We’ll be looking at Color Management in a later article, but you can learn more about the node graph setup in the following video. I start off every project by setting up my color management and template node graph. I’ve set up my color management and I’ve set up the template node graph that you see here on my upper right hand side. Color saturation principles in ResolveĪs you can see from the screen below, I’ve set up a brand new project where I’ve done nothing at all except for the same two things that I always do at the very beginning of a project.

So in this article I want to quickly show you a couple of those techniques and talk you through the principles that I like to keep in mind when I’m manipulating saturation in my images. And as a result, I’ve developed other techniques for manipulating the overall colorfulness of an image when I’m grading. It’s because I don’t like what this knob does to my images.

Is that because I don’t care about the color saturation of my grades? No. But there’s a knob right within this Primaries tab that I very rarely use, and that’s Saturation. I talk a lot about the untapped power of DaVinci Resolve’s Primaries tab and how we really need to be maxing out its tools before we move on to narrower or more complex adjustments.

Davinci resolve cinematic color grading