Recently, I’ve been going through my hard drive full of footage that I’ve shot during our stay on Heron Island in The Great Barrier Reef. A lot of it was shot underwater with a GoPro Hero 7 Black inside a dome port. Most of it looks quite flat with either a green or pale blue tint with a definitive lack of red. Today I wanted to have a look at the process of color grading or bringing those colors back into an underwater video shot with a GoPro using the free video editor – DaVinci Resolve. The process itself isn’t complicated and can be easily done, but we need to understand the idea behind it and, of course, the controls that need to be adjusted. So let’s dive into it!

Original video and settings

Today’s example is a little video clip of a green sea turtle swimming away and revealing another sea turtle laying underneath her. As you can see the original video looks quite flat and the dominant colors are green and pale blue. Almost looks like the video is unusable, but let’s see what we can do! The original was shot with the following settings:

Resolution: 1080

FPS: 60

Color profile: Flat

ISO: Max 800

Sharpening: Low

White Balance: Native

I’ve used a flat profile to have some flexibility in post and 60 FPS to have the ability to slow it down a little.

I’ve pre-cut the video for the sake of this tutorial, so we don’t have to spend time on that. Let’s jump into it.

DaVinci Resolve

DaVinci Resolve – is a powerful video editor by Blackmagic Design available to download for free. I highly recommend it if you are just getting into video and don’t want to invest in Premiere Pro or something like that right away. The free version of DaVinci has almost all the features that you might possibly need to begin with. It is not the most straight forward program, but with a bit of learning under your belt, it’s not difficult to grasp either.

1. Create a new project and import the video

Alright, let’s open DaVinci and create a new project. I’ll call it ‘Sea turtle on top of a sea turtle’.

2. Locate the original video file and drop it onto the timeline. In my case it’s saved on the Desktop.

3. Change the project settings to ‘Portrait’ if your video was shot vertically, which it was in my case. See image below.

4. By clicking on the timeline find a spot in the video that represents the most adequate scene for color grading purposes. In my case, it’s about 4 seconds in where I can clearly see the turtle, coral, and the color of the water.

2. Enter the color grading section

Now let’s enter the color grading section in DaVinci by clicking on this tab located at the bottom of the screen.

3. Prepare to color grade

First of all, let’s adjust the zoom level in the preview window to 25%. Of course, that is something you can play with during the edit.

2. Secondly, let’s switch on the ‘Scopes’ in the bottom right of the screen. This will give us a better understanding of what’s going on with our edit. I like to start with the ‘Parade’ activated as it shows the balance between the red, green, and blue colors!

4. Adjusting the curves

Similar to a Lightroom edit I always start with an s-curve to increase the contrast.

5. GoPro color grading in ‘Color wheels’ tab

As you can see in the ‘Parade’ there is a lack of red color in this video. This is very common with underwater footage because the red light is first to disappear when piercing through the water. We can make the video look a lot more natural by adjusting the temperature and the tint.

Click on the ‘Color wheels’ tab within the color grading section.

2. Click on the tab #2 within the ‘Color wheels’ section

3. Let’s adjust the temperature to 1100 – this brought back the red color, but also pushed the green color out of balance. Note how the ‘Parade’ changed in the image below.

4. Let’s counterbalance the green by adjusting the tint to +85. You can see how this brought the colors in balance. The shell of the turtle has this beautiful brown now, just like we see it in real life. Getting closer to our aim here with this process!

6. Highlights and shadows

The colors of the video look much better now. But, because the original was shot in the flat profile, we can still add quite some punch by playing with the highlights and shadows. Here are the adjustments that I thought were reasonable:

Highlights: +57

Shadows: -49.5

You can see how it instantly looks punchier. And even in the ‘Parade’, we can see that each color now occupies the whole spectrum from shadows to highlights, which is what we want.

7. Saturation

To liven the video up furthermore, let’s add a little bit of saturation. You can find this parameter in the #1 window within the ‘Color wheels’ tab. In this case, I thought that +75.00 (default is +50.00) was a good setting.

Don’t forget to play the video back now and then. Sometimes the visible editing errors will be more evident in other parts of the video.

8. Sharpening

I mentioned earlier that the video was shot in ‘Low’ sharpening, so let’s add it manually.

Enter the ‘Blur’ tab within the ‘Color wheels’ section, but change the function to ‘Sharpen’ Change the radius to about 0.45. Play around with it, but for me, it works.

9. Stabilizing

Even though the original was shot with the ‘Hypersmooth’ function on, it still appears shaky to me due to my poor camera holding skills. Let’s fix that.

Click on the ‘Tracker’ tab within the ‘Color’ section of the program. Select ‘Stabilizer’ and press ‘Stabilize’.

10. Export

Now, after a few more playbacks I believe it looks decent and ready for export. The easiest way to export is to click ‘File’ > ‘Quick Export’ > ‘Export’

Final result and notes

Alright, this was my basic process of GoPro color grading for underwater videos in DaVinci Resolve. Here is the result:

Now, of course, you can dive much deeper and create your own look by further messing with the color wheels and other controls, but be quite wary as it’s fairly easy to over-do it and ruin the whole color grade. Experiment, but always reference check to the last edit.

That’s me for today. Dust off those old GoPro videos from your hard drive and give them a fresh look with this technique! As usual, if you have any questions, please ask below.

Stay inspired and drink coffee!

Read more