Learning to See in Colour

Jul 27, 2022
2 min read

Updated: Feb 2

Why DaVinci Resolve became essential beyond Premiere Pro

Part of my role at AKQA involves making sure colours don’t just look correct, but pop — especially across social-first campaigns where attention is won or lost in seconds. Colour grading is something I’ve always wanted to explore more deeply, and it’s an area I’ve openly discussed as a development goal with my current manager.

My primary editing tool is Adobe Premiere Pro. It offers solid colour tools and works well in many scenarios. But there are moments where Premiere simply reaches its limits, particularly when dealing with nuanced colour separation and skin tone control.

That’s where DaVinci Resolve comes in.

While Resolve supports full editing workflows, it’s fundamentally built for colourists. Its grading tools are on a different level. As a beginner, I’m still far from tapping into its full potential, but I’ve managed to get comfortable with the fundamentals thanks to a crash course by YouTuber Waqas Qazi. It’s an intense introduction — one that often requires pausing and rewinding — but by the end of it, you walk away with a solid understanding of how Resolve thinks. Enough to start applying it to real work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPZ4-CF_osk

I had this tutorial open on one of my screens as I was tackling the recent summer campaign that we did for ACE hardware. One of the reasons, why I decided to colour this in DaVinci was because the colours used in the art direction of the shot could not be handled in Premiere. The model had this darker olive tone to her skin and she was wearing a mustard dress. Trying to manipulate only the yellow in Premiere affected the skin tone dramatically.

In DaVinci Resolve, the experience felt liberating. I was able to isolate and mask the dress, adjusting its colour independently while preserving natural skin tones. The same applied to skin correction itself. Resolve allows precise, individual control over colour ranges in a way that feels both intentional and intuitive.

That level of control made the difference.

You can find the rest of the reels from the campaign on their Instagram page. I’ll definitely be continuing to explore colour grading more seriously, and I’ll be sharing more as I go.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/8b042a_1bfb53c5856b4eb6a879a69868680ee2/1080p/mp4/file.mp4