DaVinci Resolve Color Grading Features in Final Cut Pro

Final Cut is an amazing editing software, but one thing it lacks is advanced color grading features, and quite a few Final Cut users are switching to DaVinci Resolve for that reason. In my opinion, most of them don't need to. The plugin Color Finale 2 Pro has a lot of the same important tools Resolve has, and you can create beautiful shots without ever leaving Final Cut's UI.

Before the Resolve users tear me a new one: DaVinci Resolve is the gold standard for color grading, full stop. But for the majority of FCP creators (professional colorists aside), Color Finale 2 Pro absolutely gets the job done, and it's infinitely better than Final Cut's native tools. Here's the feature-by-feature case.

LOG wheels: compartmentalized adjustments

Like Resolve, CF2P gives you both standard primary wheels (big, gradual moves, which FCP's native tools can do) and LOG wheels, which FCP cannot. The difference: say your exposure sits right but your highlights clip slightly. Pull them down with the primaries and the adjustment bleeds gradually into other luma values. Do it with the log wheels and the change is compartmentalized: highlights come down, everything else stays put. Same for color: a small push of orange into just the highlights to fine-tune a look. More control over hue, saturation, and luma than native FCP, exactly like Resolve's primaries/log split.

Qualifiers with blur (the dealbreaker feature)

Resolve's qualifiers, which isolate parts of your shot for precise adjustments, were what first got me interested in Resolve. FCP has a similar HSL mask, with one fatal flaw: no blur or smoothing. Push a look hard, say protecting your talent's skin while turning the background blue, and the image visibly breaks apart at the selection edges. It looks terrible, and it's unavoidable with FCP's native tools when you push colors hard. In CF2P, add some blur to the HSL selection and the gradation smooths right out. Essential for better grades, and one of the biggest pros of the plugin for me.

An ACES workflow

CF2P supports ACES color transformations and working in the ACES color space. If you're unsure what ACES is: a set of rules standardizing color so work looks the same on any display. Ideally you'd use it inside a full ACES pipeline (which Final Cut can't master to), but you can still use the transform for general grading, and you should, because it's better than a LUT.

My test: S-Log3 from a Sony a7S III, once through Sony's LOG-to-Rec-709 LUT, once through ACES. Beyond the contrast difference, the ACES version has a prettier, smoother highlight roll-off, and watch the skin: Sony's color science famously adds a yellow-green tint to skin tones, and the ACES transform accounts for it, producing skin closer to what the location actually looked like. You can then add contrast and adjust the pivot, just like Resolve. Native FCP has none of this.

Named and grouped corrections

We've been asking Apple for this forever: you can rename color MASKS in FCP, so why not the corrections themselves? Who knows. In CF2P you can name every layer, which makes a complex grade infinitely easier to read, and group corrections, both for organization and because a mask applied to a group affects every correction inside it at once.

Power-window-style masks

Beyond the HSL mask, CF2P's masks mirror Resolve's power windows, and they're all trackable. Some exist natively in FCP, but the plugin adds an edge mask for graduated linear adjustments (like Lightroom's gradients), B-spline and Bezier path masks (essentially FCP's draw mask, but for color corrections), and an image mask that targets brightness ranges. Pair the image mask with blend modes on individual corrections, another Resolve capability FCP lacks natively, and you can make the bright areas of a shot pop beautifully.

The honest verdict

Let me reiterate: this plugin is not the color grading powerhouse Resolve is. It can be buggy at times, and it has fewer features. The point isn't that it's better, it's most certainly not. The point is that it brings the Resolve features that satisfy the vast majority of FCP creators' grading needs, which cancels out the round-trip to Resolve and back, a workflow that poses its own issues and eats time anyway. If you like editing in Final Cut, you can stay in Final Cut.

Try Color Finale 2 Pro free here, and have a great rest of your day.