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Use the Color page’s Primaries and HDR palettes to lift underexposed footage, check it on the Waveform and Parade, and render it from the Deliver page.
To brighten a video in DaVinci Resolve, open the Color page, select the clip, and in the Primaries palette drag the Gamma master wheel right to lift the midtones and the Gain master wheel right to raise the brightest parts. Then pull Lift back down so the blacks stay black, watch the Waveform as you go, and render the result from the Deliver page.
The steps reflect DaVinci Resolve 21.1, the version covered by Blackmagic Design’s September 2026 reference manual. The Primaries and HDR palettes behave the same way in Resolve 20, and nearly everything here works in the free version; the exceptions are pointed out where they come up.
If the job is one clip and you would rather not import it into a project, the browser-based brightener is faster. The rest of this guide assumes you are already cutting in Resolve.
Click Color in the page bar at the bottom of the window and select the dark clip in the clip thumbnails. Your adjustments go into the node selected in the Node Editor; a clip with no grade yet has a single Corrector node ready to use.
Click the scope button in the palette bar to dock a scope next to the palettes, or choose Workspace → Video Scopes → On for a floating window. Set it to Waveform, or Parade if you also want to see colour balance.
With the Primaries palette open, click the A button in its lower-left corner, or choose Color → Auto Color. Resolve analyses the frame at the playhead and balances blacks, whites and colour. Blackmagic notes it is tuned for Rec.709 at gamma 2.4, so if it misreads a night scene, reset the palette and grade by hand.
In the Wheels mode of the Primaries palette, drag the master wheel under Gamma to the right to lighten the midtones, then the one under Gain to raise the highlights. Stop Gain before the top of the trace flattens against 1023 on the scope.
Big Gamma moves tend to drag the shadows up too. Drag the Lift master wheel left until the lowest part of the trace sits just above 0, then use Contrast and Pivot in the adjustment strip if the image still looks flat.
Open Deliver, choose a preset such as H.264 Master or set your own under Custom Export, give the file a name and location, click Add to Render Queue, then click Render All.
Resolve offers several ways to make a picture brighter, and they do different things to the tonal range. Lift, Gamma and Gain overlap broadly: Lift has most influence at black and fades to nothing at white, Gamma peaks in the middle greys, and Gain is the inverse of Lift, strongest at white and fading out towards black.
The HDR palette works on SDR projects too, and it is included in the free version. Its Global controls have an Exposure control that stretches the image up from the Black Offset level, which pins minimum black in place. Because it works in a perceptually uniform colour space, it raises brightness without the saturation jump you get from the master wheels. The default zones (Black, Dark, Shadow, Light, Highlight and Specular) each have their own Exposure, so you can open the Shadow or Dark zone on its own and hold the Highlight zone where it is.
Within a Corrector node, the HDR palette is processed before the Primaries palette, so a common split is HDR Exposure for the main lift and Primaries for trims. Switching the Primaries palette to Bars mode shows the same Lift, Gamma, Gain and Offset values as separate Y, R, G and B sliders, which makes it easier to see exactly what a wheel move or Auto Color changed.
By default the Waveform and Parade scales run from 0 to 1023, showing Resolve’s internal full-range data whatever video or data level setting the project uses. On that scale, 0 is black and 1023 is white. When you render, the Data levels option in the render settings defaults to Auto, which uses the level range that suits the chosen codec; for H.264 that means legal video levels (64 to 940 in 10-bit, 16 to 235 in 8-bit). So keep the trace inside 0 to 1023 on the scope; you don’t need to aim for 64 and 940 yourself.
The scope’s option menu (three dots) has a Waveform Scale Style submenu with Percentage and other scales if you prefer them, plus Video Level Scopes to display video levels. If you turn on the Low Pass Filter to clean up the trace, also turn on Extents so the true peaks stay visible.
The bottom strip of the Primaries palette has a Shadows parameter that lightens shadow detail while leaving the midtones alone, and a Highlights parameter that recovers bright detail and blends it into the unadjusted midtones. Together they let you open a dark frame without moving the ends of the range much.
Contrast uses an S-curve by default (the Use S-curve for contrast setting in the project settings), so raising it rolls the shadows and highlights off instead of clipping them. Pivot sets the point contrast stretches around; Blackmagic suggests a lower Pivot on darker images to avoid crushing the shadows as you add contrast.
Give each job its own node. Press Option-S on a Mac or Alt+S on Windows (or choose Color → Nodes → Add Serial) to add a node, then keep exposure in one and colour balance in the next, so you can switch each off to see what it contributes. For a subject darker than its background, the cleaner route is a window on a separate node; our guide to brightening backlit footage covers that situation.
Every stop of brightening lifts sensor noise along with the picture. In DaVinci Resolve Studio, the Motion Effects palette has Temporal NR, which averages across frames, and Spatial NR, which includes the AI-based UltraNR mode. Many colourists put noise reduction on an early node so later nodes work on a cleaner image. The free version does not include the Motion Effects palette, so there the defences are a smaller shadow lift, leaving noise-only areas dark, and keeping Midtone Detail at zero, since raising it adds contrast around edges and can make grain more visible.
Log clips look dark and flat until they are transformed, so set up the conversion before judging brightness. Either set Color science to DaVinci YRGB Color Managed in Project Settings and give each clip the right Input Color Space, or add the Color Space Transform Resolve FX to the first node. For camera raw clips, the Image tab of the Edit page Inspector and the Camera Raw palette on the Color page expose the raw settings, including an exposure or ISO control depending on the format, which is the cleanest place to brighten them.
Rendering re-encodes the whole timeline, and freshly lifted shadows are where heavy compression shows up first as blocks and banding. A few choices on the Deliver page protect the work.
For more on protecting detail through the whole chain, see how to brighten a video without losing quality.
Creating a project, importing media and rendering through the Deliver page is a long way round for one underexposed clip from a phone. brighten.video is built for that case and runs in your browser: open the video, press Auto brighten or pick Night video, Dim room, Backlit or Slightly dark, then set Strength and check the Before and after split.
More options shows a Histogram or Waveform and adds manual sliders, including Exposure, Midtones (gamma), Shadows, Highlights, Blacks and Whites. Its Exposure is a gain in linear light with a smooth roll-off in the highlights. Noise reduction is included at no cost, though it is a simpler edge-aware smoothing of dark areas rather than a temporal denoiser like Resolve Studio’s.
Click Export video, choose Format, Size and Quality in Export settings, and when “Your video is ready” appears, click Download video. Nothing is uploaded, and there is no account or watermark. Be clear about what it cannot do: it always re-encodes, it writes 8-bit output, and it cannot recover areas recorded as pure black or clipped white. Anything with several clips, windows or tracking belongs in Resolve.
Only partly. The Edit page Inspector has no general exposure or brightness control, apart from the raw settings in its Image tab for camera raw clips. On the Cut page, the Tools button under the viewer has a Color section with Auto Color, which is the fastest one-click fix. For anything manual, go to the Color page.
Use Gain when the black point is already in a good place, because it raises the image while keeping black anchored. Use Offset when the whole signal sits too low, then bring Lift down so black does not turn grey. Either way, watch the top of the waveform for clipping.
The darkest values have been lifted along with the rest, usually by Offset, a big Gamma move or raised Lift. Drag the Lift master wheel left until the bottom of the waveform touches 0, then add Contrast with a lower Pivot if the shadows need more weight.
No. The Motion Effects palette with Temporal NR and Spatial NR is a DaVinci Resolve Studio feature. The Primaries and HDR palettes, the scopes and the Deliver page all work in the free version.
On Resolve’s default 10-bit scale, keep the trace between 0 and 1023 and let render settings convert to video levels. A dim scene can stay low on the scale; what matters is that faces and key details are readable and nothing important is clipped at either end.
It gives an immediate neutral starting point from the frame at the playhead, and Blackmagic itself describes the results as hit-or-miss. On a scene meant to look like night it may brighten more than you want, so treat it as a first draft and reset the palette if it goes wrong.
Yes. brighten.video brightens a single clip free in your browser, keeps the file on your device, and has a waveform and manual controls if you want them. Resolve is the better choice for an edit with many clips or for footage that needs masking and tracking.