A Guide To Composite Modes in DaVinci Resolve

An online refresher of how composite/blending modes work

This Insight is designed to refresh your knowledge on blending modes and discuss what they are, what they do, and how to utilise them as grading tools in the Colour Tab. The article below summarises the six blend mode categories and demonstrates a wide range of blending modes as a handy reference guide. The video Insight uses the Multiply, Soft Light and Screen blend modes to balance and stylise a shot inside DaVinci Resolve’s Colour Tab.

Photoshop introduced nineteen original blend modes in 1994, becoming a staple feature in most editing and colour-grading applications, including DaVinci Resolve. A blending mode is a powerful tool that allows you to combine two layers in many different ways. When using blend modes, there is a base layer, a blend layer and the final result. The base layer is the original image. The blend layer is the new material that is blended with the base layer. The final result is the combination of the two images. The following examples will feature a landscape image as the base layer and a 10-stop grayscale generator as the blend layer.

Six major categories of blend modes combine pixels to achieve different results:

• Normal
• Darken
• Lighten
• Contrast
• Inversion
• Component

Normal Blend Mode

This blending mode is the default composite mode. This blending mode does not blend pixels, it just reveals pixels from the layer beneath. For example, placing a 10-step generator above an image and lowering the generator’s opacity to 50% reveals the image underneath uniformly.

Normal