Color Management DaVinci Resolve

In DaVinci Resolve there are 2 color management menus to pay attention to.

Preferences→General

Here you can choose to enable/disable "Use Mac display color profiles for viewers" (on Mac) and "Use Windows display color management and HDR for viewers" (on Windows) which is equivalent to switching your monitor's ICC Profile on or off.

Enabling it means Resolve will do the necessary conversions to ensure the image displayed in Resolve’s viewer adapts to the characteristics and color space of your monitor.

This option not always yields the expected results and the conversion might not be accurate. We encourage you to run some tests and see if the images displayed in Resolve looks closer or not to what you see on other devices like smartphones, tablets and TVs with this option enabled. Based on that you can opt to keep it on or off.

For Mac users, below the "Use Mac display color profiles for viewers" option you'll find "Viewers match Quicktime player when using Rec.709 (Scene)". This option is aimed at making Resolve's viewer match Quicktime Player's viewer, as a way to address the famous gamma shift issue on Mac. This setting will only affect Resolve's viewer when Rec.709 (Scene) is selected in the Color Management menu. If you want to make your images match between Resolve and Quicktime Player, enable this option and we will show you how to set Color Management and CineDream Preferences acordingly in the paragraphs below.

After settings Preferences we need to match this same settings inside CineDream.

In Preferences/Color, make sure ICC Profile is checked if you chose to keep Display Color Management enabled in Resolve, and unchecked if you chose to keep Display Color Management disabled.

The second menu to look at is Project Settings/Color Management

Here make sure Color Science is set to DaVinci YRGB, this means you’ll be using a non-color managed workflow. This is important because all your color management will happen inside CineDream and we don’t want two different color managements, Resolve and CineDream, to collide.

Then for Timeline and Output color space choose Rec709, gamma 2.4 for broadcast or 2.2 for web, depending on your intended delivery. If you checked "Viewers match Quicktime player when using Rec.709 (Scene)" in the Preferences menu to ensure Resolve and Quicktime Player match, change the Timeline color space and Output color space to Rec709 (Scene).

Back to CineDream, Preferences/Color menu, set the gamma accordingly. If you chose Rec709 (Scene), change Gamma to 1.9 (Apple), as that is the Gamma used in Quicktime Player.

With the color management settings matched between CineDream and Adobe Premiere Pro you can expect a 1:1 match.