Nodes 101

BeginnerDuration ~10 min video + 30 min hands-onTools DaVinci Resolve (free)

Why this lesson

Here’s a scenario you’ll live if you skip this lesson: you spend twenty minutes grading a shot, the client says “love it, but drop the saturation a touch,” and you can’t — because your saturation is tangled up on the same layer as your exposure, contrast and color fixes, and touching one moves all of them. Nodes solve this. A node is one layer of grading, and the discipline is simple: one job per node. Exposure on one, white balance on the next, saturation on a third. Each is a light switch you can flip off to see what it did, reset without losing the others, or hand to a client as “the saturation node.” Nodes are the single habit that separates someone who pokes at a grade from someone who builds one. This is the beginner version — just a clean, labeled, serial tree.

Watch

Watch for: Watch the moment Mostyn does the same saturation move two ways. First he piles it onto node one alongside his offset/lift/gain — it looks fine, but now that node holds four different jobs at once and he can't isolate any of them. Then he resets and puts saturation on its own serial node — and shows he can switch just that node off while keeping the level changes. That contrast is the whole lesson. Also note how he reads the node flow: the green dot is the original image feeding node one, which feeds node two, and so on to the display.

The explainer

Open the Color page and look at the Node Editor (top-right). Every clip starts with a single node, and a small green dot on the left is the original image feeding in. Whatever you do in the Primaries palette gets recorded onto whichever node is currently selected. That’s the first thing to internalize: the palettes don’t grade the clip directly — they grade the selected node, and the node holds those adjustments.

A node is a layer of grading. It carries a set of adjustments — exposure, color, contrast, a curve, whatever you did while it was active — and you can switch it on and off by clicking its number. Off, the image skips that layer; on, the layer applies. That toggle is why nodes matter: it makes every decision reversible and inspectable. You can look at your shot with the color fix but without the contrast, or vice versa, just by flipping switches.

Serial nodes run in a chain. When you add a serial node (right-click → Add Node → Add Serial, or Alt/Option-S), it lands after the current one, and the image flows through them in order: the original feeds node 1, node 1’s result feeds node 2, node 2’s feeds node 3, out to the display. This is node order, and it’s not cosmetic — because each node works on the output of the one before it, the sequence changes the result. A contrast move behaves differently before a color fix than after it. For now the rule is simply: go in your correction order — exposure, then balance, then contrast, then saturation — one job per node, left to right.

Why separate the jobs? Mostyn’s demo says it best. Put everything on one node and it works, but that node is now a black box holding four decisions welded together. Want to soften just the saturation? You’d have to reset it and rebuild. Split them out — node 1 exposure, node 2 balance, node 3 contrast, node 4 saturation — and every decision becomes an independent switch. You can compare, undo one thing, or explain your tree to someone else. An empty node, by the way, does nothing at all until you make an adjustment inside it; adding one “just in case” while you think is completely fine and costs nothing.

Label them. A tree of 01 02 03 04 tells you nothing in a week. Double-click a node’s name (or use the labeling field) and call them what they are: Exposure, Balance, Contrast, Sat. Ten seconds of labeling now saves you re-reading your own grade later, and it’s the mark of someone who treats grading as a craft rather than a guess.

That’s Nodes 101. You are not building complex trees yet — no parallels, no layers, no keys. Just a short, clean, labeled serial chain with one job on each link. Get that habit set now and everything in Level 2 bolts onto it.

Do it

1. On a clip, do your exposure work on node 1 and label it Exposure.
2. Add a serial node (Alt/Option-S), label it Balance, and do your white-balance fix there.
3. Add another for Contrast, and a fourth for Sat (saturation).
4. Now play: click each node’s number to toggle it off and on. Watch the image lose just that one job. Reset the Contrast node (right-click → Reset Node) and confirm the others survive untouched.
5. Middle-click-drag to reposition nodes if the layout gets messy — moving them on screen does not change the order; the connecting wires do.
6. Screenshot your labeled four-node tree. That’s a professional’s minimum.

Level 1 node recipes — the serial tree, labeling conventionsnode-recipes-l1.pdf161 KBOriginal course material — free to useLevel 1 workbook — every lesson's Do it exercise, checkboxes, capstone brief & sign-offlevel-1-workbook.pdf571 KBOriginal course material — free to use

Terms introduced

Terms introduced in this lesson

• Node
• Serial node
• Node order

Each term links to the glossary, where it is defined by the way you just used it.

Check

Check yourself

1. What is a node, in one sentence?

   A single clip on the timelineA saved export presetOne layer of grading that carries a set of adjustments, which you can switch on and offA type of scope

2. In a serial node tree, how does the image flow?

   Only the last node mattersThe image passes through each node in order, one feeding the nextAll nodes affect the original at once and are averagedNodes run in parallel and never interact

3. Why put saturation on its own node instead of on the same node as your exposure fix?

   So you can toggle the saturation off independently and still keep the exposure fixResolve requires itIt renders fasterIt changes the color science

4. You add a new serial node and nothing happens to the image. Is something wrong?

   Yes — the node is brokenYes — you must always grade a new node immediatelyNo — but the export will failNo — an empty node does nothing until you make an adjustment inside it

Check answers

You can move on when you can… build a labeled serial tree with one job per node, toggle any single node off to show what it did, and explain why the order of the chain matters.

Mark this lesson complete

Go deeper

Darren Mostyn — My Perfect Node Tree for Color Grading (ResolveCon ’24): this is an intermediate talk — come back to it after Level 1. It shows how a working colorist architects a full tree with parallels, layers and shared nodes. You don’t need any of that yet, and watching it now will just make nodes feel scarier than they are. Bookmark it; when your simple serial trees start feeling limiting, this is your next step.

Watch for: [Come back after Level 1.] How Mostyn groups jobs into stages and why he keeps corrections and looks on separate branches — the same one-job-per-node principle, scaled up.

Next up: 1.5 · Log, LUTs & normalization — where you learn to recognize flat “log” footage and fix it correctly instead of grading it by eye.