A Mini-timeline is also available and can be viewed by making sure that “Timeline” is active in the Interface Toolbar. You can view a Thumbnail timeline by making sure that “Clips” is active the Interface Toolbar. It provides you different means of navigating the clips in your project. In the middle of the screen is the Timeline. There are different types of nodes - Serial, Parallel, Layer, Outside, and RGB Splitter - the most basic of which is the Serial Node. Nodes are connected linearly from left to right. You can use a single node tree for basic color correction tasks, or use multiple nodes for more complex color-grading jobs. This is where you build your color-correction node tree. You can also toggle between three other different types of viewers - these are the Enhanced Viewer (Alt/Option + F), Full Screen Viewer (Shift + F), and Cinema Viewer (Command/Ctrl + F). The Viewer also allows you to do (1) Image Wipes and (2) Split Screens to help you with color matching, and refine your secondary color corrections by viewing your selections through the (3) Highlight view. The Viewer displays the frame of the current position of your playhead in your timeline so you can see what you’re grading. Grabbed stills also contain grades which you can copy to other clips. This is where you store still frames that you can use as a reference when you’re grading and matching your clips in the timeline. Inactive panels have a muted button in the Interface Toolbar. It has buttons for the Gallery, Timeline, Clips, Nodes, OpenFX, and Lightbox. The Interface Toolbar allows you to hide and show different sections of the Color Page. The Color Page in Resolve has several areas that work together to let you grade your clips quickly and easily:

We’ll start by reviewing the different components of the Resolve interface.

Related Post Color Correction Basics Using Adobe Premiere

If you need to get started from a more elementary level, check out our post on Color Correction Basics Using Adobe Premiere before continuing. This article assumes that you already have prior knowledge on how to grade clips in other software like Premiere Pro, Avid, and FCPX, so I won’t talk about video scopes and other color correction essentials. This overview of Resolve’s Color Page will clear things up, so you can start color correcting and grading your clips in no time. DaVinci Resolve is very powerful free software for color correcting and grading your footage, but a lot of people find it confusing and complicated.

Master color grading in davinci resolve