Tools & Charts

Tools & Charts holds the on-screen checkers. Each one draws a reading directly on the image so you can judge exposure, white balance, skin, and saturation while you grade, instead of switching to a separate scope. They read the image and never change it, so you can turn one on, read what it tells you, and turn it off. The grade underneath is untouched.

Turn on one checker at a time. Most of them replace the picture with a diagnostic view, so they are meant to be read and then dismissed, not left running.

The checkers

False Color maps luminance to color so you can read exposure at a glance. The scale is measured in stops, with middle gray at zero, and False Color Range sets how wide a range it shows, from plus or minus two stops up to plus or minus five. When the Input Transfer Function is a gamma 2.2 or 2.4 curve it switches to a percentage scale instead of stops, and the mode setting is not used there. Use it to place a face or a key tone at the exposure you want and to see what is clipping.

Skin Checker finds skin tones and shows how close they sit to a target hue. On-target skin reads green, tones that are too red read red, and tones that are too yellow read yellow. The target hue is set by the Skin Target Hue (DCTL: Skin Vector) slider, so you can match it to the skin in your shot. It is the fastest way to see whether skin is balanced without eyeballing it.

White Balance Checker highlights the neutral areas of the image, the pixels with very low or no saturation, in green. When your neutrals are actually neutral, they light up. Use it with Temp and Tint to confirm a balance rather than guess at it.

Middle Gray Checker highlights low-saturation areas that sit at middle-gray luminance, in red. It gives you a fast read on where middle gray actually falls, which pairs well with Exposure and Pivot.

Saturation Checker shows perceptual saturation as a false-color ramp that runs black to green to red. It is exposure-decoupled, so a red object reads the same in shadow as it does in sun, and two colors at equal perceptual saturation read the same regardless of hue. It reads the graded image, so treat it as a relative diagnostic for comparing saturation across the frame rather than an absolute gamut-boundary reading.

Negatives Checker flags invalid pixel values, the kind that break a grade or a downstream node. It marks not-a-number, values below zero, values at exactly zero, and infinite values, each in its own color, and it reads the graded result so problems your grade introduces still show up. If a shot is misbehaving after a heavy correction, this is where you find the pixels causing it.

Reading aids

These help you use the checkers and read the grade itself.

Checker Split View shows the graded image on one side and the active checker on the other, split left and right on a landscape frame or top and bottom on a portrait one. Use it when you want to compare a checker reading against the graded picture in the same view.

Show Specular Mask (DCTL: Highlight Speculars) shows exactly which pixels the Speculars control in the Tone group is acting on, so you can set the specular range without guessing where it starts.

Show Grade Curve Overlay (DCTL: Show Curve) draws a curve on the image that combines your Exposure, Flare, Fill, Contrast, Balance, and Speculars moves into a single shape, so you can see the overall tone transfer your correction is applying. Saturation is not included.

Checker Guides draws a legend at the bottom of the frame for whichever checkers are active, so you do not have to remember what each color means. It is on by default.

Checker Smoothing (DCTL: Smoothing) trades playback speed for cleaner checker overlays. High and Medium average the source sample over a wider area, which steadies the reading and stops the overlay from flickering on noisy footage, at some cost to playback. Off removes the smoothing. It affects the checker overlays only, not the graded image, and it has no effect on the Negatives Checker.

Next

Walk all of this in order on a real shot in the Resolve Quick Start, or go back to the everyday sliders in Grading Controls.