In order to get beautifully professional looking images or video, you’ll need to do some colour grading. Here’s how to colour grade for free in DaVinci Resolve!

What is Colour Grading?

Colour grading is the process of improving or adjusting the appearance of an image. Elements such as contrast, saturation, black level, and white point can be altered stylistically. Colour grading can help to highlight the faces of the main subjects in photography. It can also be used to create certain moods in film, or create the impression of different temperatures.

It is important to colour grade images, in order to ensure your footage is stylistically appropriate. Also, it helps to create consistency, whether this be across a photography portfolio or showreel.

How to Colour Grade in DaVinci Resolve

There are loads of fantastic resources out there to edit photos and video on. There are also great platforms to learn more about creative processes on, like photography classes or online video editing lessons. But, with all this choice also comes a slight case of option paralysis. How to know which editing software to go for?

One of the preferred software for colour grading just so happens to be available for free. DaVinci Resolve started out life as a colour grading tool, before developing into a more complete video editing package. The colour page, Blackmagic boasts, is Hollywood’s favourite colour corrector.

In this video, you can learn how to emulate the colour grading of your favourite films, and even adjust further. The level of control you get with this free editing software is really quite something!

To get the simple yet extensive fundamentals of colour grading, this video from commercial colourist, Waqas Qazi, will give you everything you need to know. Resolve, due to its vast tools, can be a bit of a learning curve. However, the latest updates have simplified things, and you can colour grade quickly without being a rocket scientist!


Once you’ve colour graded your videos, don’t forget to add a killer soundtrack. Synchedin offers a huge library of awesome royalty free music, perfect for using in films, vlogs, and more! All tracks have the sync license covered, so no need to worry about copyright issues or complications down the line. Get unlimited download access to tracks for just $4.99 per month or $49.99 per year.