Quick and Dirty Color Balance

Quick and Dirty Color Correction

Here’s a tip for a fast and easy basic color correction in Resolve when there’s nothing obvious to work with. If you can find anything in the dominant light of the frame which should be neutral (white, neutral gray) - no matter how small - you can remove color casts easily.

Here’s our starting point:

Green and dark….

All we’re going to do is isolate one of the white diagonals on the clap board using a power window, like this:

Then we’ll use Gain in the Primary Wheels to wiggle it a little bit so that we can find our selection on the RGB Parade. At first, the Parade looks like this:

But with a little manipulation, we easily see our selection:

All we need to to do now is use the Primary Wheels to level the selection across the Parade …

...remove the Power Window (by clicking again on the selection). Voila! We have a quick rough color balance:

Addendum:

Another method which sometimes (but not always) makes it easier to see your selection is to use Shift-H after you have selected the area you'll be balancing. While this won't help with your viewer window, which will look like this: 

it will have the effect of focusing your RGB Parade on the selection only:

which can make it easier to balance.

Yup. It’s that easy. Happy Grading!