I've just started thinking about working with colour and video. I've got DaVinci and have watched a couple of getting started tutorials & had a bit of a play. I'm hoping you all have some suggestions on what to learn first and/or good tutorials to get me started. I'm a total beginner and at this stage am hoping for some light editing - I'm not sure full on editing is my bag, but I want to learn a bit. This morning I had a play with the colour warp which seems more intuitive for me than the other options, but clearly I lack skill & finesse at this stage!
This is a quick before/after quick clip of a few seconds and I've put a four shot of screen captures in a comment below - which probably isn't very interesting :D

top two are in the video above; bottom two were little changes to see what happens. Only colour warp was used.

Hi Kristin,

It's difficult to give you here some advice on an encyclopedia like Davinci Resolve.

At the moment, I can't think of any specific color grading tutorials. I should recheck to see if I've saved anything in my YouTube links. Anyway, I don't remember seeing an underwater color grading video that fully satisfied me. They all end with mediocre results. And many of the ones for land footage aren't very useful because they start from situations completely different from ours, or, if you notice, the clips they start with are technically perfect, many times shot in raw. Not exactly common cases.

Anyway, let's say that, in general a sequence could be:

1. Color: If your footage is in Log or RAW, the first thing to do is convert it into your working color space (for example, Rec.709). This is essential for correctly viewing the colors and brightness on your monitor. Skip this one if you shoot in Rec.709

2. White Balance: Use the eyedropper or tools like the color wheels or the "Temp" and "Tint" options to remove any color casts and make the whites and grays truly neutral.

3. Exposure Correction: Adjust the image's brightness. Use the "Lift" (for shadows), "Gamma" (for midtones), and "Gain" (for highlights) controls to fix the general contrast and exposure.

4. Saturation and Contrast: Add or remove saturation and contrast to get a clean and defined image.

All of this is usually called "Primary Correction".

Once your clip looks balanced and technically correct, you can move on to the creative color grading phase. And that's a completely different story.

In the end you apply the final touches as noise reduction, sharpening or midtone sharpening etc..

The tool you used is very powerful and should be used sparingly. I almost wouldn't call it a primary correction tool, and in any case, I would use it for specific interventions on certain parts of the image after adjusting everything else. From what I can see, you're using it like a WB tool.

Do you shoot in Rec.709 or Log?

Do you use lights or natural ambient light?

AWB or MWB?

Davide has given you some good basic pointers to get started, while I'm no video shooter, I've picked up a few things, playing with a little footage. Firstly the amount of adjustment you can make tends to be more limited than what you might be used to on stills, depending on what codec you used. Second getting close on white balance out of camera is going to make your life easier, smaller shifts are easier to deal with and you are less likely to get "lost" along the way and end up with a messy looking clip.

@Davide DB thanks so much. TBH you pretty much lost me early though as I'm not even sure what a "primary correction tool" would be, assumed Davinci could do most things even if it's way more than I'll ever need. I don't even know what I'm shooting in - I put it in the housing and hit the button. I'm using the Insta360 Ace Pro 2. Most of what I've shot is just with the camera tho I have a Kraken video light that I've used a couple of times so far, too.

I suppose I have been thinking of it as an all over white balance. I figured selectively adjusting colour on certain elements in video is well beyond me, I've just been trying to make it not blue. Clearly, I need to try to find some good reading to help me get started not thinking video is the same as photo!