DaVinci Resolve Powergrade and Gallery Explained

DaVinci Resolve Power Grades for Faster Workflows

Color grading is awesome. It’s where you inject mood, style, and polish into your footage. But let’s be real: recreating complex looks across multiple clips, or even different projects, can be incredibly tedious. Doing the same adjustments over and over again? That’s not efficient, and frankly, it drains the creative energy.

What if I told you there’s a way to save your brilliant grading work – not just the final look, but the entire node structure – and apply it instantly wherever you need it?

In the video above, I dive into DaVinci Resolve’s best-kept secret for efficient color grading: Power Grades. If you’re tired of repetitive grading tasks, you need to watch it.

What Are Power Grades (And Why They Beat LUTs)?

Many editors rely on LUTs (Look Up Tables) for presets, but LUTs have a major limitation: they only store the final color transformation. They don’t remember how you got there – the individual nodes, the specific curves, the qualifying, or the windowing you meticulously set up.

Power Grades are different. They capture your entire node tree. This means:

• Complete Structure: Save complex grades with multiple nodes, qualifiers, power windows, etc.
• Full Flexibility: Apply a Power Grade and then tweak any individual node or parameter. You’re not locked into a baked look.
• Consistency: Ensure your signature looks are applied consistently across different shots or projects.

Think of them as super-powered, fully editable presets.

Saving Your Genius: Creating a Power Grade

As I show in the video (around [0:35]), saving a Power Grade is ridiculously easy:

1. Get your grade looking perfect on a clip.
2. Right-click on the Viewer window in the Color Page.
3. Click Grab Still.

Boom. That still, containing all your node information, is saved in the Gallery’s “Stills” album for the current project. Congratulations, you’ve just saved yourself potentially hours of future work!

Reusing Your Brilliance: Applying Power Grades

Applying a saved grade from your gallery is just as simple (check it out at [0:26]):

• Select the clip you want to grade.
• Drag the saved still from the Gallery onto the node graph area or directly onto the clip thumbnail.
• Alternatively, right-click the still and choose Apply Grade ([1:12]).

Instantly, your complex grade is applied. Need to adjust something? No problem – all the original nodes are there for you to modify.

Sharing Grades Across Projects: Power Grade Albums

The default “Stills” album is project-specific. To use your saved grades in other DaVinci Resolve projects, you need Power Grade Albums ([0:47]).

1. In the Gallery, right-click in the album list area and create a new Power Grade Album (give it a descriptive name like “My Signature Looks” or “One-Click Netflix Vibe”).
2. Drag your saved stills from the “Stills” album into your new Power Grade Album.

Now, when you open any project, your Power Grade Albums and the grades within them will be available in the Gallery, ready to be applied!