Lumetri Color vs DaVinci Color Grading — When to Use Each

ANSWER (the really important stuff)

Use Lumetri Color when your edit is already humming along in Premiere Pro and you need a quick colour tweak for a YouTube video, a social media clip or some corporate content. If you’re editing a high-end movie that demands a really cinematic colour job you’re better off jumping into DaVinci Resolve. Leafing through the Lumetri colour panel is all you need to cover 80% of the everyday colour corrections without ever leaving the timeline. DaVinci Resolve on the other hand is the industry standard for pro-grade colour grading and is used by the big Hollywood players.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Lumetri Colour sits right inside Premiere Pro’s timeline so you can knock out basic colour work without ever having to leave the edit .
• DaVinci Resolve’s node based Colour page gives you total Creative control and professional-level scopes – basically everything a colourist could want .
• Use Lumetri for the quick & dirty colour jobs, LUT’s & projects where colour’s not the main focus .
• Use DaVinci Resolve for the big-budget colour jobs, complex camera matching & high-end HDR or wide gamut projects .
• Loads of pros cut in Premiere and Re-export to Resolve for colour .
• The free version of DaVinci Resolve has the full Colour page (no watermarks or time limits – woohoo!)

INTRODUCTION

Colour work in video editing is split into two main areas: colour correction and colour grading. Colour correction is all about fixing problems – getting the exposure right, sorting out the white balance, and making sure skin tones look spot on. Colour grading, on the other hand, is where the magic happens – it’s a creative process that sets the mood, establishes the look, and basically tells the story through colour.

Both Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve can do both colour correction and colour grading, but they approach it very differently. So, Premiere’s Lumetri colour panel just sits inside the edit timeline while DaVinci Resolve has a dedicated colour page that’s based on nodes – exactly the same system that pro colourists have used for years.

So, which one do you choose? Well, it’s not really a matter of which one is better, it’s just about which one is best for your project, your workflow, and your level of expertise. This guide will explain both systems and tell you exactly when to use each.

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LUMETRI Colour – The Easy Bit

Lumetri Colour is Premiere Pro’s built-in colour panel. It pops up right alongside your timeline so you can sort out the colour while you’re still editing .

Main Tools

Basic Correction handles the basics – get the white balance right, adjust the exposure, and make sure the skin tones look natural. There’s an eyedropper tool that lets you set the white balance by clicking on a white object in the frame.

Creative lets you apply some fancy looks and LUTs. There are film emulation presets, some useful fade controls, sharpening and vibrance adjustments on tap. You can save your own custom looks as .look files and reuse them across different projects.

Curves give you total control over the brightness and contrast, as well as the individual colour channels. The RGB curves adjust the brightness and contrast – quite straightforward really. The Hue Saturation curve lets you target specific colours for saturation changes.

Colour Wheels are the same as the ones you’d find in a traditional colour grading panel. You drag the wheel towards a colour and it tints the shadows, midtones and highlights. The luma slider under each wheel lets you adjust the brightness.

HSL Secondary lets you isolate a specific colour and adjust it. Use the eyedropper to select skin tones or a specific object in the scene, then adjust the hue, saturation and luminance for that specific colour. And of course, you can use a mask to get the selection just right.

Vignette takes care of those pesky dark areas around the edges of the frame.

Scopes

Lumetris scopes give you a super useful way to analyze your colours. You’ve got waveform, vectorscope, histogram and parade – all the tools you need to get your shots looking just right – and avoid any nasty clipping.

Workflow

Lumetris is all about workflow integration. The beauty of it is that you never have to leave the timeline. You can apply a correction, check out the scopes and then move on to the next clip in no time. For those projects where you don’t need to get too deep into colour work this saves you a whole load of time.

DaVinci Color Grading Explained

DaVinci Resolve started out as a dedicated colour grading tool and in many ways that core strength is still at its heart.

The Original Color Page

This is the bit where Resolve really came to life. The Color page is its own little workspace within Resolve. It’s got the viewer, the node graph, the color wheels, the curves, the scopes and the qualifier tools all in one place. The idea is that every tool is designed to give you total control over your colours.

Node Based Workflows

One thing that sets Resolve apart is the way it uses nodes. Instead of layers you use nodes – each one a processing step. They all link up together in a chain called a node tree which lets you isolate corrections make them happen in a sequence and even modify any step without messing up the rest of the chain.

A typical node tree is broken down into four stages. The first stage handles the basics (exposure and white balance) the second stage does the curves the third stage does secondary correction using qualifiers or power windows and the fourth stage slaps on the creative LUT.

You can label your nodes too. Right click on any node and choose ‘Node Label’ to give it a name. A labelled node tree tells you exactly what each stage is supposed to be doing whereas an unlabeled ten-node tree tells you nothing.

Scopes

The scopes in Resolve are quite a bit more comprehensive than Lumetris. You’ve got waveform, vectorscope, histogram, parade and RGB parade to give you total control over your colours.

Secondary Correction

The HSL qualifier lets you pick out colours based on their hue, saturation and luminance – very handy for getting the right look. And then there’s the power window which lets you draw a mask to restrict your corrections to specific parts of the image. Both tools can even track moving subjects automatically.

Colour Management

Resolve supports all the top colour management workflows including ACES and DaVinci Wide Gamut – which is great news if you work with data from a multitude of different cameras. It lets you accurately transform between colour spaces and keep all that lovely data safe.

LUMETRI COLOR VS DAVINCI RESOLVE

Ease of Use

Lumetri is a no-brainer for newbies. The controls are right there next to the timeline, so you can make adjustments on the fly without having to switch pages or manage a bunch of nodes.

Resolve’s Color page has way more controls, but that can be overwhelming for beginners. It’s like trying to learn a new language – the node system takes time to get your head around.

Precision

When it comes to precision, Resolve is the clear winner. The node-based grading lets you get surgical with your color corrections and secondary tweaks are just more accurate. The scopes give you even more data to work with when trying to match a look.

Lumetri is precise enough for most people, but if you’re only 80% happy with your color, you won’t need Resolve’s level of control.

Advanced Grading

Resolve handles all the complicated grades: matching footage from multiple cameras, creating HDR deliverables, and working with wide color gamut. And in Resolve 21.1 they even added a multimaster trim feature that lets you grade each HDR format separately.

Lumetri just can’t match that level of depth – if you’re doing anything fancy, Resolve is the way to go.

When to Use Lumetri Color

Use Lumetri when colour just isn’t the main event. YouTube videos, social media clips and corporate edits don’t usually need all the bells and whistles of Resolve. Lumetri will knock up a decent exposure, white balance and simple look in no time.

Use it when your edit is already in Premiere. Round-tripping to Resolve will just add complexity and time. If your grade is pretty straightforward, just stick with what you’ve got.

Use it for quick LUT appications too – the Creative section will slap a look on in an instant, no need to faff around switching pages.

And use it for basic secondary corrections too – the HSL Secondary tool is decent for picking out skin tones or specific colours. It’s a bit limited compared to Resolve’s qualifiers, but for simple fixes it’ll do the job.

When to Use Davinci Resolve

Use Resolve when you need to get cinematic with your colour. Narrative films, documentaries, music videos and commercials will all benefit from the level of precision you get with Resolve.

Use it when matching cameras is a big part of your project. Each camera is gonna render colours a bit differently, so Resolve’s scopes and colour management tools are a lifesaver.

Use it for the advanced secondary corrections too. Tracked power windows will follow moving subjects and qualifiers will isolate even the most complicated colour ranges. Lumetri just can’t touch that level of control.

Use it when you need HDR or wide colour gamut delivery. The multimaster trim feature in Resolve 21.1 will sort out all your different deliverables for you.

And use it when you’ve got a dedicated colourist on the project – the node-based workflow is the industry standard, and will make collaboration between editors and colourists a whole lot easier.

WHICH ONE SHOULD YOU LEARN FIRST?

If you edit in Premiere most of the time and color isn’t your main focus, then Lumetri is probably your best bet. It’s right there in your workflow so you can pick up color correction as you go along. The good thing about Lumetri is that the skills you learn there will transfer over just fine to Resolve later on.

On the other hand, if you want to get into color grading and make it your specialty then Resolve is probably the way to go. Even the free version of Resolve has access to some really professional tools – and if you learn the nodes from the get go then you’ll be building a solid colour habit. And trust me, it’s a habit that will pay off big time when you’re working on high end stuff.

To be honest, if you are starting out with no editing software at all and are looking to do color then Resolve is probably the best place to start. It’s free to start with and the colour page will teach you all the professional techniques you need to get started.

CAN YOU USE BOTH?

Absolutely – and lots of pros do. The standard workflow is pretty simple: you edit your footage in Premiere, export an XML or use one of those nifty project converters and then take the project to Resolve to do the colour grading. And then once you’re done in Resolve you can just import it back into Premiere for a final delivery.

Now I know what you are thinking – this all sounds a bit fiddly and like it’s going to add a lot of extra time to your workflow. And you’re right, it does take a bit longer to do things this way. But to be honest, the results will be so much better that it’s definitely worth it if you need that level of quality.

One of the best new tools to come out is CornerCut – this thing actually converts your Premiere project files into Resolve files without needing to use an XML file, so all your keyframes and audio routing get kept intact.

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CONCLUSION

So Lumetri and DaVinci Resolve are pretty different beasts, really. Lumetri is all about speed, ease of use and just getting the job done for most everyday colour work, which is about 80% of the time. It’s a great tool for doing quick colour correction and for social media stuff.

But if you’re after a proper cinematic grade and something a bit more complex then Resolve is your best bet. It’s the industry standard for colour grading, the node based workflow and the advanced tools make it a dream for complicated colour work.

The choice is all down to what you need to do with your project – do you just need to knock out some quick colour or do you need something more serious? And the thing is, many pros just use both – editing in Premiere and colour grading in Resolve. So take a look at both of them and see which one suits your needs best – you’ll probably find that one of them – or both – will serve you just fine.