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.

Key takeaways from this Insight

By the end of this Insight, you should understand how to:

• Confidently interpret different blending modes and use them to explore different blending techniques.
• Change a Serial Node’s composite mode to create adjustments based on the image source
• Decrease exposure using the blend mode: Multiply
• Increase contrast using the blend mode: Soft Light
• Add a soft glow using the blend mode: Screen

External Links

• Adobe Helpx: Photoshop blending modes explained

Related Mixing Light Insights

• How To Color Correct With Blending Modes : The Overlay Mode – You can use the Overlay blending mode to add grain and get great colour and contrast pop, with the click of a button. Watch me put it to use.
• Color Correcting With Blending Modes : Using the Add & Screen Modes – In Part 2 of this series you learn how to use the Add and Screen blending modes to create glows, texture or light leaks to your moving images.
• Neo Noir B&W – Using Hardlight Blending Mode – Creating a feature film neo noir look can be tough. Dan shares his look using hardlight blending modes instead of his beloved curves.

A Visual Guide to Blend Modes

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.

Here are the six major categories of blend modes, combining 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

Darken Blend Modes

This blending category renders a darker result. There are five different blending modes in this category:

• Darken
• Multiply
• Colour Burn
• Linear Burn
• Darker Colour.

Darken Blend modes render a darker final result because the darker pixels on the blend layer will remain opaque, and the brighter pixels become transparent. In other words, anything on the blend layer that is white will turn invisible, and anything darker than white will have a darkening effect on the pixels below.

Multiply

Multiply is a popular blend mode from this list. Always results in a darker image. Any pixel multiplied with black, turns black. Any pixel multiplied by white is unchanged.