06:45Creative Video Tips · Tutorial
NEW Photo Page Tips in DaVinci Resolve 21
A walkthrough of Resolve 21's new dedicated Photo page — import, cull, grade, and batch-export raw stills without ever leaving the video editor.
April 13thThe argument in one line.
A cinematic color grade is not one LUT applied uniformly to every shot — it is an ordered sequence of technical corrections (color space, exposure, white balance) performed before any creative look, followed by careful post-LUT refinements like black levels and grain, in that specific order.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You edit and color your own footage in DaVinci Resolve and want a repeatable, ordered workflow instead of eyeballing sliders.
- You've noticed a LUT or preset that looked great on one clip looks wrong on the next, and want to understand why.
- You shoot on a log camera format (Arri, RED, Sony, DJI) and aren't sure how to set up color space management correctly before grading.
SKIP IF…
- You already run a professional colorist pipeline and are only here to evaluate the presenters' commercial power grade.
- You want camera or lighting technique — this is grading-only, with no shooting advice.
The full version, fast.
Two colorists walk through an 8-step workflow for grading footage in DaVinci Resolve before any creative look is applied: set the timeline to DaVinci Wide Gamut with a Rec.709 Gamma 2.4 output, correct exposure inside the HDR tab for photometric accuracy, convert camera color space with a CST node, fix white balance using repeatable printer lights, then move from global corrections (contrast, subtractive saturation) to targeted creative touches (teal-in-neutrals, vignette, halation). After the Rec.709 LUT, they add black levels, sharpness, glow, bleach bypass, and grain last. The throughline: work global-to-granular, and don't skip the technical setup before reaching for a look.
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00:00 – 01:08
01 · Intro: the one-look mistake
Mark frames the problem of applying one look uniformly across every shot and introduces guest colorist Nick Pilecki and the MBNP PowerGrade being sold on Black Friday.
01:08 – 01:50
02 · Step 1: Color space setup
Set the Resolve project's timeline color space to DaVinci Wide Gamut/Intermediate and output color space to Rec.709 Gamma 2.4 before grading anything.
01:50 – 03:26
03 · Step 2: Think big to small
Work from global corrections toward refinement instead of jumping straight to skin tone or specific colors; first application of the power grade to an Alexa 35 clip.
03:26 – 04:56
04 · Step 3: Exposure in stops
Correct exposure inside Resolve's HDR tab, tagged to the camera's native gamma/color space, for a photometrically accurate stop-based adjustment.
04:56 – 05:46
05 · Step 4: Color space transform (CST)
Convert the camera's native color space (Arri LogC4/Wide Gamut 4) into DaVinci Wide Gamut so every downstream node works in one consistent space.
05:46 – 06:58
06 · Step 5: White balance with printer lights
Correct white balance using full/half/quarter-stop printer lights instead of dragging color wheels, since one move affects both color and exposure at once.
06:58 – 08:05
07 · Sales pitch: the extended tutorial
Mark and Nick pause to pitch the 60+ minute color grading tutorial and Black Friday course sale bundled with the power grade.
08:05 – 09:12
08 · Step 6: Contrast & pivot
Shape contrast via curves rather than the contrast wheel, using 'editable splines' for finer control over where shadows start breaking.
09:12 – 10:25
09 · Step 7: Subtractive saturation
Why the plain saturation slider is dangerous, and how controlling vibrancy through a gain wheel avoids an artificial, oversaturated look.
10:25 – 11:46
10 · Step 8: The look
Creative shaping begins: injecting teal into neutral/shadow areas while leaving skin tones alone, plus a subtle two-node vignette.
11:46 – 12:36
11 · Halation
Adding filmic highlight glow with Resolve's native halation tool, using its isolated-region preview to avoid glowing unintended areas.
12:36 – 14:39
12 · Look principles & the post-LUT chain
Why it's safe to keep adjusting after the Rec.709 LUT (black levels, sharpness, glow) as long as data isn't clipped.
14:39 – 15:33
13 · Bleach bypass
Resolve's Film Look Creator is weak at most things but excels at bleach bypass, the film-era desaturation effect suited to documentary/genre footage, not corporate work.
15:33 – 16:47
14 · Final thoughts & sign-off
Wrap-up, reiteration of the Black Friday sale on the power grade and the Cinematic Eye/Cinepath Pro courses, plus a live feedback-call perk for academy members.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- A single LUT or preset applied uniformly across every shot fails because each shot's exposure, white balance, and camera color space differ, requiring per-clip correction underneath any creative look.
- Setting the DaVinci Resolve timeline color space to DaVinci Wide Gamut and the output color space to Rec.709 Gamma 2.4 before touching any wheel prevents the entire grade from looking wrong once exported.
- Gamma 2.4 is the industry-standard viewing gamma for color correction, distinct from what most consumer monitors default to.
- Correcting exposure inside the HDR tab, tagged to the camera's native gamma and color space, is the only photometrically accurate way to change exposure in Resolve — a 0.25 pull there is an actual quarter-stop change in the original camera data.
- A Color Space Transform (CST) node converts a camera's native color space into the working space so every downstream node, from white balance to halation, operates in one consistent space.
- Printer lights (full/half/quarter-stop color additions or subtractions) correct white balance more safely than dragging a color wheel, because adding a color also raises exposure and removing one lowers it — one control handles two problems at once.
- Subtractive saturation — driving the gain wheel inside a dedicated saturation node instead of the plain saturation slider — raises vibrancy while pulling exposure down, which is what keeps skin tones from turning artificial at high saturation.
- Injecting teal specifically into the neutral and shadow areas of an image, while leaving skin tones untouched, is what gives a 'blockbuster' look its color separation without looking manipulated.
- A subtle two-node vignette (brighten center, darken edges) is enough to redirect viewer attention to the frame's center without being visually obvious.
- Working after the Rec.709 LUT is safe as long as the data isn't clipped — the common advice that 'nothing should happen after the LUT' only holds when clipping is actually occurring.
- Bleach bypass, historically the last chemical step run on physical film to desaturate and cool an image, is one effect Resolve's otherwise-weak Film Look Creator plugin does exceptionally well.
- Film grain is placed as the very last node in the chain and left uncolorized so it reads as a clean texture sitting on top of the image rather than a tint baked into the color.
- Halation should be checked against the plugin's isolated-region preview before committing, since it's easy to accidentally glow an unintended highlight, like a patch of grass or a fingernail.
A grade lives or dies on setup, not the look you slap on top
GRADING WORKFLOW
The presets and LUTs that make footage look cinematic only work when the underlying color space, exposure, and white balance are corrected first, in a fixed order, before any creative look is touched.
01Intro: the one-look mistake
- Applying the same LUT or preset to every shot fails because each clip's exposure and color space differ, so grading requires clip-specific correction underneath any preset, not instead of it.
- The corrective work that happens before and after a preset is applied is what actually determines whether the final look is accurate, not the preset itself.
02Step 1: Color space setup
- Set your Resolve project's timeline color space to DaVinci Wide Gamut, and its output color space to Rec.709 Gamma 2.4, before making any correction, or every wheel adjustment can look wrong once exported.
- Gamma 2.4 is the accepted industry standard for judging color while grading; viewing footage under any other gamma biases every decision you make afterward.
03Step 2: Think big to small
- Work from global corrections toward refinement, fixing the whole image's exposure and balance before touching localized areas like skin tone or a specific color.
- Jumping straight to skin-tone or color-specific fixes without global correction first is the most common beginner mistake in color grading.
04Step 3: Exposure in stops
- Correct exposure inside the HDR tab, tagged to the camera's native log gamma and color space, rather than the standard color wheels, since it's the only photometrically accurate way to change exposure in Resolve.
- An HDR-tab exposure pull is expressed in actual camera stops, so a 0.25 adjustment reliably means a quarter-stop change on every clip, unlike a generic gain or offset wheel.
- Match your grading monitor to your external viewing device, like a phone or TV, so the corrections you make carry real confidence once exported.
05Step 4: Color space transform (CST)
- A Color Space Transform node converts a camera's native color space, such as Arri LogC4/Wide Gamut 4, into the working color space so every node after it operates consistently.
- Different cameras need different CST settings; a power grade pre-configures this per camera, but you must set it correctly yourself when grading manually.
06Step 5: White balance with printer lights
- Printer lights, full, half, or quarter-stop color additions or subtractions, correct white balance more safely than dragging a color wheel, since a small trackpad move on a wheel can shift an entire image unpredictably.
- Adding a color via printer lights raises exposure while removing a color lowers it, so one control can correct both a color cast and a brightness problem at the same time.
08Step 6: Contrast & pivot
- Adjusting contrast through curves rather than the contrast wheel gives more visual, less mathematical control over exactly where shadows start breaking.
- Clicking 'editable splines' on a curve node lets you soften an edge instead of just dragging a point, giving finer control over where a shadow transition begins.
09Step 7: Subtractive saturation
- The plain saturation slider is the most dangerous tool in color grading; pushing it produces an artificial, oversaturated look instead of rich cinematic color.
- Subtractive saturation, controlling vibrancy via the gain wheel inside a dedicated node, increases color richness while simultaneously pulling exposure down, avoiding the artificial look of a cranked saturation slider.
10Step 8: The look
- Injecting teal specifically into an image's neutral and shadow areas, not its skin tones, creates the color separation associated with a 'blockbuster' look.
- A subtle two-node vignette, brightening the center and darkening the edges, redirects viewer attention to the frame's center without being visually obvious.
11Halation
- Resolve's native halation tool lets you preview the isolated highlight regions it's affecting in real time, so you can confirm you're only glowing intended highlights and not stray areas like grass or a fingernail.
- Subtlety compounds; a single halation adjustment looks minor on its own, but color grading is the sum of many small, individually subtle changes.
12Look principles & the post-LUT chain
- The rule that nothing should happen after your LUT only holds if you're clipping data; with enough nodes built in before the Rec.709 LUT, working after it can be safer for fine adjustments like black level.
- Black level is difficult to fine-tune before the LUT because the LUT itself determines where black sits, so fine-tune it after the LUT instead.
13Bleach bypass
- Bleach bypass, historically the last chemical step run on physical film to desaturate and cool an image, is one effect an otherwise weak film-emulation plugin can do exceptionally well.
- Bleach bypass suits documentary, genre, or underexposed footage; it's the wrong choice for corporate or clean commercial work, where it looks unintentionally desaturated.
- Film grain is placed as the last node in the chain and left uncolorized so it reads as a clean texture sitting on top of the finished image rather than a tint baked into the color.
Terms worth knowing.
- CST (Color Space Transform)
- A Resolve node that converts footage from a camera's native color space, like Arri LogC4, into the color space used for the rest of the grade, keeping every downstream correction consistent.
- LogC4
- Arri's fourth-generation logarithmic color encoding, used to capture maximum dynamic range on Alexa cameras before it is converted to a standard viewing space for grading.
- Rec. 709
- The standard color space and gamma curve, typically paired with Gamma 2.4, used to judge and deliver footage for standard HD/SDR displays.
- Printer lights
- A color-correction control, borrowed from analog film printing, that adds or subtracts a color in full/half/quarter-stop increments, changing hue and exposure together.
- Subtractive saturation
- A saturation technique that raises color vibrancy by lowering exposure through a gain wheel, rather than pushing a saturation slider, to avoid an artificial oversaturated look.
- Halation
- A soft glow around bright highlights in an image, historically caused by light scattering inside film stock, that colorists add back digitally for a filmic look.
- Bleach bypass
- A film-processing technique, skipping the bleach step, that leaves silver in the print, producing desaturated, high-contrast, cooler-toned images, recreated digitally as a grading effect.
- Power grade
- A pre-built, shareable set of grading nodes that can be applied to a clip in one click as a starting point, rather than building a grade from scratch.
- Pivot (contrast)
- The midpoint value a contrast adjustment rotates around; moving the pivot changes whether a contrast boost affects shadows or highlights more.
- DaVinci Wide Gamut
- Blackmagic's internal, camera-agnostic color space in Resolve that all footage is converted into so different camera formats can be graded consistently in one timeline.
Things they pointed at.
07:04productMBNP PowerGrade extended color grading tutorial (60+ min)
16:00productCinematic Eye course
16:00productCinepath Pro course
Lines you could clip.
00:01
“When it comes to color grading, I think many of us have made this mistake in the past... we find a lot that works on one or two of our shots and then we slap it on everything and hope for the best.”
09:08
“I think this is the most dangerous tab in color grading.”
11:39
“Subtlety is kind of the king with a lot of these color tools.”
15:33
“If you made it this far, congrats. You care about your color.”
Word for word.
Read-along
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metaphorstory
When it comes to color grading, I think many of us have made this mistake in the past where we find a lot that works on one or two of our shots and then we slap it on everything and hope for the best in post production. And in this video, we wanna talk about those few extra steps that happen before and after your preset, so that you can get the most out of your footage.
And we're working with Nick Palecki today. Nick's an incredible DP and colorist and has shot some amazing projects and had the pleasure to collaborate with him on a bunch myself. Him and I have been working on this power grade for years together.
This is something that Nick has developed for over three years. And full disclosure, this power grade is for sale. We're gonna be selling it on Black Friday starting off with a huge discount.
Some more information down below. And that power grade will also come with a color grading master class and Nick's recorded well over an hour taking you through all the steps, all the nuances that you've ever wanted to get the most out of Resolve or whatever platform you're using for color grading.
Nick, let's jump into this right away. Let's talk about step number one when it comes to coloring and this is setting up your color space. So step one is very important because if you don't set up your project correctly, all the work you do with spinning the wheels, raising gain, adding saturation, it could be inaccurate by the time you export or view it in any other monitor.
So you kind of need to prepare things properly. So what I do is I go to file, project settings, and under color management, I make sure that my timeline color space is set to da Vinci wide gamut or intermediate, and my output color space is rec seven zero nine gamma 2.4.
Gamma 2.4 is the industry standard for what you should be viewing under when making corrections.
Step number two is something that Nick has always taught me because he would watch me get in there and start fixing skin tone and trying to add teal and orange here and there. But it's about working on the global corrections and then moving towards refinement. And this power grade that we have will help you go through that step naturally.
A 100%. I guess a great place to start is like, let's just apply the power grade to a clip so we can see what we're working with. So I have a clip here from a short film I recently just shot, and it was shot on Alexa 35.
As you can see, the power grade comes in many different flavors from red, Alexa mini, Sony footage stuff. In which by the way, if you buy this grade and you're missing the camera you want, reach out to us, send us the footage and we can apply and create one for that. So Alexa 35, I'm gonna right click on my thumbnail here.
I'm gonna go to apply grade. Wow. And out of the box That already looks pretty good.
Not bad. Yeah. Out of the box.
I would say that's pretty good for a one click method. And so majority of the work here is being done by just my 23 codec, twenty three eighty three LUT that I kind of grade all of my footage underneath.
And the twenty three eighty three is just essentially a filmic LUT that we have inside our grade. It's a very popular blockbuster Hollywood print lot that's been used for a long long time.
So this is a derivation on that that I think works well in commercial narrative corporate. I just like it as a a a thing to work underneath. Now you might be looking at all of these nodes and power grid and be like, Nick, I've never seen anything like this.
I don't know how to work with it. This is where we're gonna make it less daunting as we work from the global to the granular, working from left to right to show you that there is almost like a path to work down Mhmm.
And that you don't have to work with every node. Some of these nodes are just left to be meant untouched, and I can show you which ones affect the greatest change. Great.
Let's jump in. So the place I start first is exposure. That's where I'm kinda like, I've applied the look.
Is my exposure too hot? Am I underexposed, overexposed?
I like to mess with the skin and the face the least. So I try to get that looking good and almost affect the rest of the image around them. So I'm actually pretty happy with where the kids face is here.
This one is a horror short film. So I actually think that I'm a little overexposed from where I wanna be. Looks a bit happy.
Sure. So not a of lot people use the HDR tab and this is my favorite way to do exposure because it's the only photometrically accurate way of changing your exposure in Resolve.
So HDR, you actually tag it to your gamma, which is your Arri Log c four here and color space, which is wide gamut four. And now when I go on my global wheel and I say, hey, pull it back point two five, that actually means that in camera, I'm telling it to go down a quarter stop of light.
Mhmm. So when I on off that, I'm saying pull the image back a quarter stop.
Mhmm. And it's reliable between clips. A little side note here.
Come on. There we go.
So that right there, you can pan that. Nick just puts a small HD there. I always have another monitor where I'm grading off of because I want my viewfinder and my external monitor to look very similar or the same.
So I have the confidence to know that when it's exported, it's gonna look the same once it gets to the phone, iPad, TV. I just need to know that the chains we're making are actually accurate.
The next step I go to is the CST. Now this will already be set up for you if you pick the correct version of the power grade. However, some of the cameras, they'll have a different color space like the Ronin four d Mhmm.
Some of the Canon stuff. So this is where you would kind of change your color space. To decode some of the workflow that we're doing here, you'll notice that whatever your camera is, in this case, it's Arri wide gamut four, Arri Log c four, I'm converting it to DaVinci wide gamut.
So that means that everything after this CST node from white balance all the way down to halation, this will be working in our DaVinci wide gamut. I like this because that means you're photometrically affecting the original color space that you're working on.
Then I'm saying, let's make it so we can transfer this from clip to clip after we've done that conversion. I'm eager to get into the other steps. Keep going.
Don't stop, Nick. Next, we're gonna talk about white balance. This image has a little bit of a green tint.
Obviously, you're in a field full of green leaves. So where I would have gone in the past is I would have started messing with the offset in our color wheels, but there's some danger, especially if you're on a trackpad, is one little move changes the whole image. So, Nick, you use printer lights.
Yes. I love printer lights because they're repeatable between clips. It's something that I always rely on.
Uh, so the way you can use printer lights is you go to color and if you go down, you can see that it's full half quarter printer lights. Broad terms, printer light means you can either add a color or subtract a color from your image. So let's say we have an image that's too green.
There's two ways we can do that. We can either add magenta or take away green. What the plus and minus mean is that you're also affecting exposure by whatever change you're doing.
So if you add a color to something, you're increasing exposure with your image. And if you're taking away a color, you're decreasing exposure. So let's say I have a clip where I'm like, it's too bright and it's too green.
Well, then I can do two things at once. And the more things you can do with a broad stroke, the less damaging it's gonna be to your footage. I think also too because it is full half quarter, you can keep track of how much you've affected exposure.
And as mentioned, if you want to get more into the details of what Nick's teaching, we have an extended color grading tutorial that comes part of your purchase with our power grade. And that's available right now.
This power grade can be applied to any type of footage. And with that color tutorial, Nick will take you through how to get the most out of anything you've shot, especially the stuff that you've screwed up on. We'll teach you how to bring that back into the cinematic look that you intended on set.
And Nick does this at the end of every shoot that he does. He quickly throws on this power grade, does some tweaks and sends out the footage. I've got to experience that with him on set, whereby the next morning or sometimes even that evening, we as a team will have stills and clips from the shoot that we just did, getting to see how good the footage can actually look.
And it's so exciting when it looked good on set and then it looks amazing in post production. So if you want this power grade, like we said, it's on sale right now. We have a huge Black Friday sale on it.
And if you like Nick Blecky's teaching, he's in both our Cinematic Eye and our Cinepath Pro course where he goes in-depth into cinematography and color grading. And those are both available during Black Friday on sale for up to 50% off.
So after we've done our general exposure and white balance, we wanna concentrate on contrast and saturation. There's kind of two ways that I approach contrast on my clips is you can do it from the contrast wheel here and the pivot also affects this, which we'll get into more in the sixty minute video on how to manipulate both of these.
The other way might be a bit more intuitive for people is you go to your curves here. I love a curve. Curves are very people understand them.
People. Curves are great because you can kinda see where the image is being pulled down, where the image is being pulled up. It's less mathematic.
It's more visual, I would say. So one trick I always use with my contrast is I go to the three dots on our curves here and I click on editable splines.
This gives us more control and more granularity working over the tool. So if you click at the bottom, instead of, like, clicking and dragging a point, you now get line that kinda like softens the edge on where we want the shadow to start breaking.
So if I do an on off of that, I like that. It pops the face. I can bite on that.
Very subtle. Very subtle. Now coming back out, our next step here is saturation.
And . People often just grab the saturation slider and pull it over and this begins to make it look goofy. It looks like a rainbow intense colors.
It almost looks like a LUT's been added twice. Exactly. Have you ever wondered well how when you watch a Hollywood film, they seem to have such rich skin tones, contrast, and color, it doesn't feel like it's been pushed too far?
There's actually an approach that those Hollywood colorists would take traditionally on film that would get them to those results. And the way that I do saturation is something called subtractive saturation. And it's based on old film principles where you're affecting exposure and vibrancy
at the same time. So within my subtractive saturation node, I actually have the gain wheel as the thing affecting saturation. So as you increase the gain, that's increasing the vibrancy, but it's actually pulling exposure down and that helps the density or the richness of the color come out without it starting to look artificial, clowny, like there's red patches in the skin.
So this is just a more subtle way of affecting vibrancy that feels a bit more natural than if you were to take the saturation wheel and crank it up or down. After I have the exposure, white balance, contrast, and saturation in a general good place, I now wanna start thinking about manipulating specific parts of the image, the look.
Like, we've done the boring stuff. Now, let's start dialing in. So one big thing that I do with almost all my footage is I'm trying to inject teal into the neutral parts of the image.
I have it done with a color warper here and you can basically see I'm on offing it here. The skin is remaining unaffected, but basically all the neutral parts of the image.
So you can see like in the shadows on his sweater, in his hair here. We can blow So much more pleasing with that look on.
It just helps the skin pop out more and it doesn't break your footage down. It basically puts teal into everything beyond the skin tone. So you're helping get it that color separation out of the box.
It already looks more like Yeah. A movie with that one little node. The pre hue versus hue is a simple one.
Don't have to touch it. I'm just targeting the skin to go along the skin line of the vectorscope. It's a safety thing I do to compress that tone to the skin line.
You're in and out is a subtle vignette where I'm saying the in part of my frame, let's target that. So exposure slightly increases on the in part and we can customize the shape with our window tool here.
And then my out part, I'm saying let's pull down exposure with that. So you can see if I take these two nodes on off, how it just refocuses your eye to center of the image.
So . The last thing that I use in the look before our Rec seven zero nine conversion is halation. The reason why I like this plugin in Resolve that comes natively with it is you can view the isolated regions.
So I can actually see where I'm targeting the halation here. So let's say I only wanted to hit, like, the high highlights on the specular parts of the boy's cheek, the shoulder, and the sky.
I can actually see in real time where that's affecting. Because sometimes halation is very subtle. Mhmm.
You never know if it's bouncing off a fingernail or something unwanted. So this is where you get to change your threshold. For instance, I don't think that this part of the grass should be haling.
Well, full screen and then let's go to his shoulder. That's probably where we're gonna see it the most. If I do on off, you can kinda see that glow.
Very subtle. Very subtle, but color grading kind of is a bunch of these subtle changes added up into one. So that would kinda be like the principles for what I would call your base look there.
So we're kind of done with our pre look steps. Now we're gonna work after our Rec seven zero nine. You'll hear things online saying the the LUT should always be the end chain of your power grid, and you should never do any work after that because you'll clamp data.
That is true. However, because I have so many nodes built in pre the Rec seven zero nine LUT, you should not be clamping data anyways. I think you should be working on the rec 709 sometimes because working on the rec seven zero nine is actually closer to the color value at the end.
So let's say I didn't like the green of our grass here. Working on the green pre LUT is pretty wide. You're gonna get some spill from the yellows and affecting the skin.
Sometimes you do wanna work after the rec seven zero nine LUT as long as the data is not clipped. Also, one thing I like to do after the LUT is my black level. Very difficult to fine tune your black level before the LUT because the LUT kinda dictates where the black level sits.
So after your LUT, let's say this is a horror movie, I want my blacks to touch zero. I can take my curves in my black level and just say, move that down. So we're still not clamping data, but just move that down there.
And I would say that's probably too heavy, so let's half the intensity of that node. I like that.
Feels good and crunchy. The last bit of change are our sharpness, which is just the amount of sharpening I like on most footage, but that's gonna vary click preference.
It's gonna be preference. The glow, it's kind of like this bloomy effect which thickens up colors. You can see up in the sky here.
And then there's the film look creator. This is a great plugin in Resolve that I don't see a lot of love for. It's because it's not great at a lot of things.
It's not good at halation, grain, exposure, contrast. It's bad at all those. Some of those things.
But what it's great at, it is the best bleach bypass I've ever seen. Cool. And why do you want bleach bypass?
So in the olden days when they were doing films, bleach bypass was almost the last step that they would run film with to tame your colors back in. And it's just that last layer of like taking it from like kind of digitally saturated down to like, oh, we're getting into that war time Mhmm.
Hollywood. Now, if I'm doing a corporate video, a hierarchy commercial Probably not gonna use it. I'm not gonna rock the bleach bypass.
Yeah. But if you're doing something documentary or doing something that's kind of like Genre based.
Genre based or even just like more underexposed or low darker footage, this is the most reliable way of doing bleach bypass and I don't have to reach for this look every time. I like having it built into my power grade and I get to decide whether I want it in or not. The last step of the chain A little bit of grain.
Little bit of grain. There's gonna be some debate on this because some people like having the grain at the start of their chain because film stock historically has grain in it. I personally don't like to colorize my grain.
I just like it clean and a texture that dances on top of the footage. So I put it at the end of my chain. It's the last thing There you go.
That I wanna see.
So if you made it this far, congrats. You care about your color. If you wanna go more in-depth, we do have that full color grading.
I'm gonna call it a master class because then with the amount of detail you go into it, Nick is incredible. But this power grade is now available. Very exciting.
I haven't released a color piece of tool since I released my LUT, like, five years ago. And I've been working with Nick the last few years and been seeing how he's color grading. We've been talking, hey, we should release something.
Let's tweak this. Nick has graded a bunch of my projects and this is the process that you can apply to all of your footage to ensure that you can adjust it so that it lands where you need it to get. And if you want to get a live tutorial on this, if you're in our Cinepath Pro course, Nick teaches that and we have live feedback hours calls where you can book a time slot, talk with Nick.
You can pull up your color grade and he could even work through it with you in real time in that. That's all part of the art of documentary and all of our courses are on sale this Black Friday if you're interested in joining that academy. Thank you for watching this.
Let us know if you have any questions and get grading.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Mark Bone opens with the mistake nearly every self-taught colorist makes: finding one look that works on a single shot, then pasting it across an entire project and hoping it holds. To fix it, he brings in DP and colorist Nick Pilecki to walk through the eight-step process, technical setup first, creative look second, that sits underneath the power grade the two of them built and are selling.
Named ideas worth stealing.
05:46list
MBNP PowerGrade 8-Step Workflow
- Color space setup
- Think big to small
- Exposure in stops
- CST (color space transform)
- White balance with printer lights
- Contrast & pivot
- Subtractive saturation
- The look
The ordered sequence the power grade is built around: technical corrections first (steps 1-5), then creative shaping (steps 6-8), before any post-LUT refinement.
Steal forany personal LUT/preset pack — sell the workflow, not just the preset file
09:12concept
Subtractive Saturation
Using the gain wheel inside a dedicated saturation node, instead of the plain saturation slider, so vibrancy increases while exposure is simultaneously pulled down, avoiding the artificial oversaturated look of a cranked slider.
Steal forany preset/LUT pack that wants rich color without looking oversaturated
06:20concept
Printer Lights White Balance
Full/half/quarter-stop color addition or subtraction that corrects both color cast and exposure in one repeatable move, safer than color-wheel dragging.
Steal forany tutorial teaching white balance correction
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
15:34product
“If you want this power grade, like we said, it's on sale right now. We have a huge Black Friday sale on it.”
Repeats the product pitch three times across the video — soft at 0:18, explicit mid-video at 7:04, and again at the close — normalizing the sale as background context to the tutorial rather than a single interruption of it.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
Visual structure at a glance.
