Should You Use Resolve Color Management lub CSTs?

In this article, I want to answer one of the most common questions I get about color grading: Should I use Resolve Color Management or Color Space Transforms? Which is better? What is the ideal color management workflow for our images?

Let’s dive in and do a side-by-side comparison of both approaches and see which one works best in DaVinci Resolve.

Grading with Resolve Color Management

Here we have some log images in our timeline. The first one is from a RED camera, the rest are ARRI.

I’ll start by showing you Resolve Color Management. As you can see, we’re starting from zero, with just a few log images in our timeline.

To set up a project using Resolve Color Management, first go to Project Settings, choose Color Management, and set the color science to DaVinci YRGB Color Managed. You also want to flip Automatic Color Management off so that you can have full control to make the most out of Resolve Color Management. After that, navigate down to Color processing mode and choose Custom.

Set the Color science to YRGB Color Managed, turn off Automatic color management, and select Custom for Color processing mode.

After that, find the dropdown menu for Input Color Space. For this menu, you want to make your selection based on what kind of footage you’re working with. Today, we’re working a lot of ARRI footage, so I’m going to choose ARRI LogC3.

Choose your Input color space based on what kind of media you are working with.

Next, set the Timeline color space to DaVinci WG/Intermediate. I’ll also choose Custom 10,000 nits for the Timeline working luminance. That’s just my preference. It ensures that I’m not clipping anything out in the high end of the image before I’ve had a chance to grade it.

We’re also going to set our Input DRT to None—we’re working with a custom Timeline luminance, so we don’t need it. For Output DRT, I’ve chosen Luminance Mapping because that is my preferred way to work. And for Output c