Color grading a render in Davinci Resolve - Tip of the Week

In this tutorial you will learn how to export your rendering from Blender, import it to Davinci Resolve match the colors between these applications and color grade your image.

DaVinci Resolve is a sophisticated and professional application - at first it main purpose was high quality color grading of film footage, after many updates it became a workhorse for filmmakers - it is a powerful video editing application, capable also of sound enginnering and vfx compositing. It has very interesting set of tools for tweaking the colors of your image and it can significantly  improve your renderings. And the best part: Davinci Resolve has also free version that is more than enough for professional color grading and editing your animations. You can download Davinci Resolve Free from Blackmagic Design site.

The most important in this process is to match the color space between Blender and Davinci Resolve, it's quite an easy set up.

Exporting from Blender

First, render your image in Blender. Then, at any time (even after rendering is finished) you can change the output color space of your render. Change your view transform in render settings to "Filmic log" and the Look to "None". This will give you linear, flat color profile that is the best for further tweaking.

Now, you need to export the file with the highest dynamic range possible. The best choice is to save your image as an OpenEXR with 32 bit color space. 

Importing to Resolve

Open Resolve, create a new project and drag and drop your EXR to the timeline or media area. Well, it does not look good at all. That it is because Resolve does not know yet how to translate color information from Blender to it's color space. But it is an easy fix.

Go to the Fusion tab and drag and drop "OCIO Colorspace" between your Media In and media out nodes.

Use "Browse" button to find your OCIO Blender profile in the folder and choose it. Blender OCIO profile is placed in your Blender folder, under [version number]/datafiles/colormanagement. Use "Linear" in  the "Source Space" box and "Filmic log" in the "Output Space" box.

As you can see, now our image looks flat and linear, as it should. And it matches perfectly the output from Blender.

You can switch to color page now and tweak your image.

If you want to export your graded image, just right click on the viewer and choose "Grab Still",

Then right click on saved grab and click "Export". Your Blender to Resolve workflow is ready!

Have fun!