Happy December everyone. Hard to believe we are officially in the final month of the year already. If you are in the US, I hope you had a great holiday weekend if you happened to celebrate it, but either way it feels good to hit this last stretch of the year with some fresh energy. I have been thinking a lot about what I want to learn and build in 2026, and I would love to hear the same from you. What do you want to get better at inside Resolve next year? What skills are you chasing? What is one thing that keeps slowing you down that you want to finally understand? On my side, I am deep into building out the full 60-day program that will take someone who is brand new to Resolve and get them confidently creating professional-looking edits in two months. I am outlining lessons, recording content, and organizing the full path right now, and the plan is to launch it in January 2026. No exact date yet, but it is coming together and I am excited for it. Since you are already here in the community before launch, you will get a major discount (maybe even free 😃) on that program once it opens. I also want to take a minute and welcome all the new members who joined in November. The community is growing steadily and it has been awesome seeing more questions, posts and conversations happen. Glad you are here. @Charlotte Matthew , @Karen Castillo , @Mansi Dharmshot , @Danny Hsieh , @Sidney Nowakowski , @Tobi Bambida , @Danele Louw , @Muavia Jadoon , @Benjamin Lanin , @Mario Ramirez , @Daryl Duchatschek , @Jeffrey Toering , @Louisa Burford , @Steve DuPree , @Daniel Ribeiro , @Francisco Reina , @Imtiaz Khan , @Andrew Lachapelle , @David Rene , @Ognyan Ognyanov , @Akhil B , @Usra Mrf , @Jared Mallon , @Christian Szeliangowski , @Laura Cruz

I spent some time breaking down my own beginner friendly node layout this week, and it reminded me how much easier color grading gets when things are separated instead of crammed into one node. The big shift is this, do your white balance, exposure and contrast before converting anything to Rec709. When you make those primary adjustments in a wider color space, you keep way more detail to work with. It feels calmer and less like you are wrestling the image. After that, adding a look or LUT on a separate node actually makes sense because everything underneath is already balanced. You can then go back and fine tune the early nodes without destroying the look on top. If color grading still feels like guesswork, try building out that simple six node stack. It gives you a clear order to follow and makes each step easier to understand.