DaVinci Resolve 21 PHOTO Page Tutorial
DaVinci Resolve 21 introduces a brand new photo workflow with a dedicated page to organize, cull, develop, and grade your raw still images. Let me show you what it can do.
Importing and Organizing
To start, you can click in the upper left icon of the media pool and choose the import media folder option to bring in all of your photos. Resolve handles a wide variety of formats, including Canon RAW CR2 files, Sony ARWs, RAW DNGs off the iPhone, and standard JPEGs.
Next, you'll want to create an album by dragging photos from the media pool down to the photo album panel that's down below. You can just select a few if you want, or drag them all down to process an entire photo shoot at once. Once they're in an album, you can close the media pool in the upper left to get more viewer space.
Navigate the photo album with just the up and down keys on the keyboard for fast navigation.
The album strip is kind of like a video timeline, but it's only for photos.
If you open this on the edit page, you're going to find it's locked with a gray playhead and no edit control.
Albums are for the photo page, the fusion page, and the color page.
Culling Your Selects
Sorting through a massive shoot is extremely fast on the new photo page.
Use S for selects to tag it with a heart or a pick.
Use X to tag a photo as a reject.
If you want to just undo that, just tap the same key again.
Look on the far left side of the photo album to find a filter option to view only the good selects.
There are also other things like star ratings and more filter options as well.
AI Visual Search
This may completely remove the process of key wording for a lot of you.
Select all the photos in your media pool and click the new button that says AI Clip Analysis.
If you analyze with the new IntelliSearch, Resolve is going to index every frame of video so that you can search for it later just by common language.
If you wanted to make an album with just dogs, type "dog" into the search magnifying glass to get all the results.
Select all of them, right click, and say "new photo album using selected clips".
This could save so much time from manually key wording photos like some caveman, as long as it recognizes things correctly.
Editing and Color Grading
A key takeaway here is that photo adjustments are applied non-destructively to the source in the media pool. If you do photo edits and then you use that photo in several video timelines, those adjustments are already done and linked across the whole project. If you're familiar with the idea of remote grades in the color page, it's really a similar concept.
In the upper right inspector, there's the raw controls for your raw images where the initial image processing happens first.
Here, you can also override those default project settings for camera formats if you want to work in a different log format.
You'll also find familiar scopes to objectively evaluate things like balance, saturation, and contrast.
There are source looks, which are stylized preset grades to get you started.
Below, you'll find the basic color and contrast adjustments.
When you make an adjustment here, it's actually applied to the very first node on the color page.
Temperature here on the photo page is the same temperature slider when you open the color page in the primaries.
You can apply your color workflow that you already know and love directly as nodes on the color page and freely hop back to the photo page for organization and culling.
To reset the controls, just double click the slider name.
To reset all adjustments, in the upper right corner there's a three dot options menu that you can use to remove and reset changes on a larger scale.
All photo edits you do here are completely non-destructive until you export, which is unlike a lot of manipulations you might do in Photoshop.
Transform Tools and Built-in Effects
Because we never left DaVinci Resolve to do photo editing, we have all of the installed effects from DaVinci Resolve right there at our fingertips on the photo page.
Click the effects palette in the upper left and search for "film look creator".
Drag it onto the image and you'll have access to all of those familiar controls like the beautiful film grain to make those old photos feel new and probably a little bit more filmic.
You can even add the lens flare effect and move it on screen.
You can even open the Fusion page to clone or paint out a distracting stick from the snow.
The photo page section of the inspector has controls for your basic transform and crop controls. The lower left of the viewer has a special tools control; click it and you get these familiar on image style kind of controls.
Crop is in the middle, featuring a drop down menu with some aspect ratio presets like one by one, if you need to make it a square.
After you crop, adjust the rotation angle that's found with the center handle.
Pro Tip: If you pull the handle out further from where it is, it will actually rotate with less sensitivity.
Once you're happy with the horizon line being lined up, you can zoom in with the scroll wheel of the mouse to fill the cropped frame boundaries and fix edges that have black corners.
The third on screen tool is for effects like a lens flare; just make sure the effect is selected in the inspector and you can manipulate the position directly on the image.
To exit those on screen tools, click the tool slider icon in the lower left of the photo page viewer.
Fast Batch Exporting
To quickly batch export your photos and develop the raws, at the top you'll see a quick export option.
This will have all those common still image file formats.
It will also include the metadata which is new in resolve in this version.
You can choose to export the entire album or just the selected images.
When you export, it's real fast because it actually uses all of the GPU power like you would expect out of a proper video editing system.
Thank you so much to Chadwick for watching, and because there's so much more to learn, we'll see you in the next video!
