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HDR Grading With the Primaries Palette
Starting in DaVinci Resolve 17, some of the palettes of the Color page with which color adjustments are made have been made “color space aware.” This means that the functionality of the palette will be mostly the same no matter what Timeline Color Space you’re using, or whether you’re grading to
create SDR or HDR output. However, not every color palette has been made color space aware, and so when using various grading controls in the Color page to grade wide-latitude images for HDR output, if you find the controls aren’t working smoothly, you may find it useful to enable the HDR Mode of the node you’re working on by right-clicking that node in the Node Editor and choosing HDR Mode from the contextual menu (this is only available in Resolve Studio).
This setting forcibly adapts that node’s controls to work within an expanded HDR range. Practically speaking, this makes it easier to work with wide-latitude signals using controls that operate by letting you make adjustments at different tonal ranges such as Lift/Gamma/Gain or the Log controls.
Which Do I Start With, the Primaries or HDR Palette?
The HDR palette, introduced in DaVinci Resolve 17, has also been developed to work as a powerful method of creating primary adjustments to serve as the foundation of your grade. While the Global and Zones controls of the HDR palette operate from a different philosophy of signal adjustment, they’re designed to let you tackle the same issues, so it’s a completely valid choice to start out using the HDR palette instead of the Primaries palette. So, which to use?
Ultimately, this is going to come down to your comfort with the HDR palette, and your experience with the Primaries palette. If your muscle memory of working with the Primaries palette continues to make it the fastest way for you to dial in your adjustments, there’s no reason to stop using it now. In fact, the Offset/Printer Points controls in the HDR palette continue to be adjustments that are distinctly different from the functionality found within the HDR palette.
However, you should also give the HDR palette a try, because it has powerful primary grading capabilities that aren’t possible with the Primaries palette modes. Even if the functionality is new to you, if you give it a week you’ll find innumerable advantages to the HDR palette’s way of doing things, even though it requires some new ways of looking at the process.
The bottom line, however, is that you’ll probably continue using both palettes. If you do, keep in mind that in each Corrector node’s order of image processing operations, the HDR palette controls are processed before the Primaries palette controls, largely because the HDR palette’s more “photographic” approach to grading has been intentionally designed to meet the needs of primary color adjustment in our new world of wide-gamut HDR mastering and output, so it’s been fit into the image processing pipeline as the new foundation of all adjustments.