How To COLOR GRADE iPHONE Video - Davinci Resolve 

OMG I've seen other videos trying to guess their way into finding a solution to this but THIS is the solution. My 1000s of HDR iPhone videos are saved!!! thank you!!

Wow! I am in Tibet. Filmed lots of incredible Tibetan Monasteries with my new iPhone 15 - The art and colors in the monasteries are fiery colorful and vivid. Was filming in HDR. Then tried to edit in Resolve and came out with absolute crap. Spent hours trying to figure out on my how to to color correct - failure. Then spent hours cruising RU-vid with same negative result -THEN I found YOUR video. Wow! Incredible results. Thanks for explaining very carefully, to speeding through (like manny RU-vidrs). You saved my footage and now I am a new subscriber and hoping to find other gems like this in your library.

AMAZING. Worked for my iPhone 13 Pro max footage as well! Would have never been able to figure that out on my own, thank you 🙏🏽

Thank you! So glad someone finally covered how to color grade smart phone footage.

It worked for my Android file. Not sure if I was supposed to use the same setting but it work. Call me crazy but I won't know unless I try. Thank you... I'm just happy to see my log file going from flat to color. Thank you again.

yeah this tutorial is mad. made my footage look heaps better. I am a beginner and this has given me a head start in regards to color grading and what not :). thanks!!!

Holy cow! Thank you!! I'm testing this on some real estate video where the house was a struggle to shoot and the difference this made is insane. I only wish I could re-deliver at this point, haha. I can't wait to use this on the next one. Cheers!

Excellent explanation of how to make our IPhone 12 video look as good as it dows in the phone. Very helpful. Thank You!

you went through with your word letsss go!!! this was much needed :)

Thank you!!! You saved us a lot of time. We were about to switch to final cut, even if davinci is way better, this is something we struggled for days. Very informative, straight to the point and you are the one to get it right unlike all other videos on youtube that go around for the same thing, but make the video even worse! Thanks.

HUGE HELP, thank you! Worked for my iPhone 13 Pro Max cinematic footage, with HDR 203 Nits Diffuse White reference level also checked.

Dude thank you so much! I just went and turned off my HDR settings for future clips and as for my existing clips I just did the SDR conversion. APPRECIATE YOU!

Thanks Jamie!! Much love❤️👏🏾

YOU ARE A LIFESAVER! ALSO WORKED FOR CINEMATIC MODE ON IPHONE 14!

Was looking all over for some decent info on importing, clips were looking better on iMovie than on Da Vinci but this has solved it! Thanks Jamie!

Thanks so much for this. Literally was fighting with this on my own, and you solved it immediately.

Wow! Thanks, great tutorial!! If working only with iPhone HDR footage, I found it can be easier to set color space and gamma directly over project settings. But without your tips I'd never figure it out which color space to use! Cheers

This is very insightful! Thank you, mate.

i"m glad I found this video. This is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you for the help!

Colorado Class man! Thanks Jamie. Been following your content for some time. Its pretty awesome.

Thanx for researching this subject. I think many content providers (including myself) have iPhone Pro Max HDR footage and were wondering how to properly import it into DV. Color Space Transformation has been a mystery to me and now I understand it better with your tutorial. West Maroon?

Thanks for SDR trick. ✌🏻

thank you looking forward to test it on my footages ;)

Thank you so much for the clear tutorial, learned a lot. I am a beginner

Hey man, really wanted to thank you with this tip! I have been struggling to make iPhone footage look nice and grew more frustrated when samsung footage looked really nice with little grading effort. You can see in my current videos that iPhone footage appears really horrible and grainy. I tried to fix this with saturation and color boosting adjustments resulting in a very noising looking image. Now with this tip that should change and I am very excited. Many thanks, - Josh

Wow, today I got my iPhone 12 pro and what I see on my feed is only iPhone 12 videos lol Great one thank you!

i use input color space and gamma as SRGB

Super informative content as always. Thanks Jamie! Keep it up man!

Thanks Jamie! Super helpful!

Thank you for this!! Lifesaver.

Multe multe multe dankon!!! Vi akiris adepton!!!

wish i had the pro iPhones to shoot in Log, but this is helpful stuff to know! getting Resolve really soon so i can put together a vlog style video for my future travels!

You're a life saver. Thank you.

That was very helpful, man!👍🏻

This is going to be so helpful thanks for sharing

Good to know. I haven't had any iphone stuff given to me to work on as of yet. Nicely done Jamie. Question - If the Apple guys gave you the gamma information , wouldn't you just use the CST and only change the input and the output gamma to match your timeline? I have been working on doing some tutorials myself the last few weeks and have a new appreciation for guys like you that make it look so easy. I always thought that talking was one of my strong suits. Not so much anymore. Great job. I will refer to this video if and when someone does drop iphone stuff on me. Thanks again.

So good to know Thank you very much

Awesome video ! As in the end we are converting to rec 709, do we get benefits of recording in HDR ?

Thank you so much for sharing it!

Thanks man, but what the heck? Why does Davinci requires a preceding curves adjustment node for the color space transform to work? Wasn't the CST effect supposed to take care of it and after specifying the correct input color space and gamut produce a viable base image? That's what the HDR tools effect does in Final Cut Pro - you just apply it, and it maps the HDR to rec.709. You don't need to add a drastic curve adjustment for it to work!

Great video, Jaime. Thank you. I am having a bigger problem, which is my iPhone videos don’t import into resolve. They only bring a still image, not the video. Do you have a good work around for this? Thank you very much.

GREAT Tutorial! just I wonder: Which is the Color Management Setting in DaVinci Resolve?

Hey Jamie! Thanks for this video, was really confused. One question - do I have to do this on every clip? Can I automate this somehow?

Thank you very much for this 🙏. But please tell me what are your color management settings: DaVinci Color Managed? SDR? HDR? And what are the right export settings? What gamma? What color space? Stay safe.

Jamie, maybe you could do this another one of this with connection to bigger cameras or something about how to shoot to be able to quickly edit in in Davinci :)

Muchas gracias!! Excelente video

Thank you so much !

how to apply the same on couple of videos together . I have like 3 videos in the timelines edited further to 100+ videos ,,, How do I avoid the same step for all 100 videos' separately

No way! Life saver

I cannot quite believe how DULL and washed out IPhone Footage actually looks, when you compare the before and after of following your Video. I am now tempted to go back and do all my IPhone 14 Pro Max, and 13 Pro Max Videos all again .. as this brings SO much more colour to them. I honestly didn't even notice how washed out they look natively, when you play them through the Phone or an Apple TV. Simple steps from you once again, thank you !!

Nice thank for sharing

Thank you so much-great video. As for the project settings, what should the Timeline color space be set to?

Great info. It would be very helpful to know what your color management is on your project settings. Thanks. -H

You saved me! Thank you!

also you completely forgot to mention your project color management settings, should we enable HDR color processing, or leave it at SDR, etc etc

*Does 10 bit 4:2:2 work on free version of Davinci?* I’m looking at buying a Sony A7IV and I’m unsure whether it will work with Davinci FREE version. Could you help with this?

INSPERATION💜💜

so thaaaanks

Thanks!I just shot my first hdr video and had a hard time in davinci ;)

Great Video Jamie! Just wondering for this particular project in DaVinci Color management setting do you set to wide color HDR? Or SDR

thanks for this!

Thank you 🙏

hey so im kinda confused. lm on a iPhone XR(10R) so should l record with “Smart HDR” enabled? then proceed to color grade like this video? and whats a better, 1080HD at 60fps or 30fps? l am recording lip syncing videos to my music for tiktok and instagram.

youre a life saver

Thanks got the great information! 👏🏻 Do all iPhone variants share the same colour space profile? What would be the log profiles of iPhone 7 and iPhone X/ XS? Thanks

Thank you so much bro it will be very useful, also how can I render in 10 bit ?

amazing!!

Great stuff! 👑 Were the iPhone 12 pro videos shot with Filmic Pro?

Can I use this for Iphone 11 footage?

Hey Jamie, great info! Question... I normally work with footage from a Pocket 4K and use DaVinci Color Managed and output to Rec709 with gamma Rec709-A for uploading to RU-vid. Will this CST workflow on a single clip, integrating iPhone HDR with Blackmagic Raw in an edit, still work and render correctly?

Hey bro u dont need a final CST node? For export to timeline color space to REC709? (Social media profile)

if oyu have a grade you use on your slog footage and want to apply that to your iphone footage, how do you do that?

hello, very useful video, but i have a little problem i shoot on iphone 13 pro and when i reset the video on macbook my color profile is set to HD (1-1-1) , and to use your method i need a color profile: BT 2020 HLG (9-18-9). Please tell me how can I fix this problem?

Can we use this in pixel video footage?

Jamie, just watched your vid through again and couldn’t see where you explain how to change the iPhone 13 videos format to suit Resolve 18.

Hey Man! I'm just wondering, can you make a video talking about the free version of resolve 17 and whether it's good or not?

Thanks Tom. I'm shooting in either LED or flouro lit workshops and though it's worked wonders on one video, I can't get rid of red shadows on skin in another.

Thanks!! (Cool location... which trail is that?)

Thanks!

Thanks a lot

Thank you! Been searching the input gamma & color space for a while now 😭. Anyway, is that in color managed timeline?

i color grade it using F log lut from my fuji camera , it worked but not amazing though

nice!

Just learning, taking a dip into color correction/management. Great video! Can anyone tell me how to duplicate the adjustments to more than one clip on the timeline? Been trying to figure it out. Thanks!

You just made my day man! Looks great, this is what I was looking for as a newbie hobby filmer/editor. So since you didn't change anything to any 10bit HDR settings within DaVinci (as many other youtubers do), do I still have to consider something regarding HDR when exporting/rendering? And could I therefore also mix in between the clips some SDR footage too?

Since the issue is caused by iPhones use of HDR when recording video it's easier to just go to settings and toggle HDR to off. That solved the issue for me.

Any advice for the Galaxy S23 ultra? I was recording in 4k hdr10+ , on the smartphone looks awesome, but in Davinci resolve is gray, no colors at all. Never done color grading-correction before. The settings used in the video, unfortunately are not usable for the android device. Thank you in advance. 😊

Buys iPhone 13 pro to shoot awesome 4k footage for youtube. Finds out I need a masters in color grading. Ha. Thanks for the awesome tip. If you just want basic RU-vid footage from the iphone 13 pro, does it just make more sense to turn HDR off and then record 4k video??

Hi Jamie, this worked well for footage from FilmicPro LogV3. It's hard to find camera/input/output settings for inputting Filmic Log into Resolve so this was super helpful!! I did find that using Filmic's log LUT was also pretty essential at the end of the node chain. Would you have additional guidance specifically for LogV3 out of Filmic?? Thanks Tons!

Hey Jamie hope you're well mate, gonna try some of these tips on my Samsung note 20 pics in raw mode. Question tho, what are you using to create the line in before and after shots where it sweeps like in the intro part?

are you filming with just the camera app or Filmic Pro?

thank you

Only works on a Mac? I have a PC

Unfortunately, This does not work for me. (IPHONE 13Pro, HDR footage, looks as expected in Mac Preview) I’m following your steps and it looks a little better, but nowhere near the brilliance and balanced saturation of the Mac Preview. I’m playing carefully with the controls but it never gets to the brightness of the original HDR material, while still looking not washed out. I’m using a MacBook M1 Pro and the free version of Davinci 18 Can you please help? Maybe create a LUT with what you feel looks good? The exact same material looks absolutely great in Luma Fusion on an iPad Pro when choosing „Wide Gamut HDR - HLG“ color space. Thank you for this video, though, as it at least got me started.

Would this work for older iPhone footage, such as X and XR?

is there any way to fix it permanently?

How do we apply this to all clips? Does this exist as a one-click trick as in Premiere? Seems like a lot of steps for such a simple task.

It always worked for me this way. But now I have a clip (and I haven't changed anything in my iPhone settings) where the color gets even worse when do it as described. My face is turning completely red when I go through the steps of the color space transformation. Have you (or anyone else) ever experienced this? Is there any other trick? The video is shot on an iPhone 13 Max Pro in HDR!

How do I find out what the input colour space of the footage is?

CORRECTION to myself in my comment, here is the best setting for iPhone, hope you try and let me know: Input Color Space: Rec. 2020 - Input Gamma: Rec. 709 - Output Color Space: Rec 709 and Out put Gamma: Rec 709-A. Make sure the last one is Type A. This will work best especially with a Mac. This will work with any iPhone. With HDR on or not,. Let me know when you try it.