Let's start from the beginning. If you have the slightest intention of tweaking the color of your renders, something you should do in 99% of cases, forget about any format other than OpenEXR. It doesn't make much sense to spend all that GPU time rendering your projects only to end up generating a sequence of PNGs or, even worse, JPGs or something similar.

Now that we've established a solid foundation to work with, we’ll end up with a nice sequence of EXR files if it's an animation, or a single EXR file if it's a still image. Let's do it.

Given that Blender 4.x uses AgX as the color transformation instead of the old Filmic, our goal before working with the color of our animation is to somehow import AgX into DaVinci Resolve. Fortunately, it’s a fairly simple process, but it's important to note before starting that this will only work with the Studio version of DaVinci Resolve. Unfortunately, in the free version, it’s not possible to use plugins like the one we will need later on. It’s feasible to do it with the free version using Fusion nodes, but it has serious drawbacks. We’ll cover that technique in a separate article. For now, let’s focus on how to do it with Resolve Studio.

• First, we will create a new project in Resolve where we will import our render, and then create a timeline to contain it.

• We will make a small change in the project settings, specifically in the 'Image Scaling' section, where we will set the Resize Filter to 'Bilinear'.

• Next, we need to download AgX for Resolve from the following URL:

  https://github.com/sobotka/AgX-Resolve

  

  • Now, we will copy the contents of the ZIP file to Resolve's default location for LUTs. Keep in mind that 'ProgramData' is a hidden folder by default in Windows. If you don't see it, you know what to do.

    C:\ProgramData\Blackmagic Design\DaVinci Resolve\Support\LUT

  • Just create a new folder inside that one, called 'AgX', and unzip in there.

  • Reboot or refresh Resolve.

  • Go to the color page and drop a node with a Color Space Transform effect. Here are the exact settings you need to use:

    

    • Last step. Drop another node and this time apply a DCTL. The only thing you really need to do here is to pick the 'Camera-AgX' from the DCTL List dropdown. Of course you can adjust whatever you want after that.

    

    And that's all. Honestly it isn't an exact 1:1 transform from Blender to Resolve but it's more than good enough.

    Congratulations, now you can start working with the color.

    Next time we will see how to do the same thing using Filmic and after that, for real pros we will dive into ACES.

    See you.