Golden Hour Portrait II: a free DaVinci Resolve PowerGrade for backlit portraits
4 min readUpdated
Golden Hour Portrait II is a free PowerGrade for DaVinci Resolve — a warm, backlit portrait look built with Helios Grade, on a frame shot through a Helios 40. Take the grade, and see exactly which part of the frame each part of it touches.
The look
What each module touches
Pick a module below to see what it is allowed to touch, and the values it is set to. This is the part worth studying if you want to build a look like this by hand rather than import it — most grades that read as heavy are heavy because an effect is landing somewhere it was never meant to.
The finished frame. Four modules are on, and none of them is doing anything you would point at on its own.
The widest of the four, and the softest. It finds her blouse and the bright gaps in the leaves on the right, and leaves her face and hair almost untouched. A radius this wide is not about the highlights it lands on so much as the air it puts between her and the trees behind her.
Mist — the controls behind it
- Mist Amount
- 0.20
- Mist Radius
- 63.2
- Mist Threshold
- 0.32
Tighter than Mist and held to the hottest cores only, which is why the individual rings in the background read as separate lights rather than merging into haze. Note how little of her face is lit here: the threshold is above her skin, so the bloom stays on the light sources.
Glow — the controls behind it
- Glow Amount
- 0.08
- Soft Glow
- 0.09
- Glow Radius
- 24.0
- Glow Threshold
- 0.46
Edges only, everywhere there are any — her eyes, the pleats of the blouse, individual strands of hair, and the rim of every bokeh ring. What matters is what stays black: the flat insides of the rings, the gaps between leaves, the smooth parts of her skin. That is Refining keeping the sharpening off flat areas so skin does not crunch.
Sharpening — the controls behind it
- Sharpen Amount
- 0.43
- Sharpen Radius
- 2.36
- Refining
- 0.27
Inverted against the others, and it should be: the centre is black because nothing happens there, and the falloff builds towards the edges. Wide and very soft — at an amount of 0.16 it is doing far less than it looks like it is, which is the point. If you can see where a vignette starts, so can the audience.
Vignette — the controls behind it
- Vignette Amount
- 0.16
- Vignette Size
- 2.00
- Roundness
- 2.00
- Feather
- 0.66
Every frame is one module with Show Mask on and the rest switched off. White is where that module acts; black is where it does nothing.
Get the PowerGrade
golden-hour-portrait-2.zip · 28 MB — the PowerGrade (.drx, exported from Resolve Studio 21) and the 4K DPX still it was graded on, so you can practise on the same frame.
Drop it in — four steps
- 1Install Helios Grade and restart Resolve.
- 2Color page → Gallery → the PowerGrades album.
- 3Right-click in the gallery → Import → pick
golden-hour-portrait-2.drxfrom the unzipped folder. - 4Select your clip, right-click the still → Apply Grade.
Free, watermarked, no expiry
Golden Hour Portrait II is one Helios Grade node, so the PowerGrade needs the plugin installed before Resolve can render it — the free watermarked version opens it too.
₹3,540₹1,77050% OFF
Code LAUNCH50
Buy once, use it on up to 3 machines, 15 days to change your mind.
Shot on
The footage behind the frames above
- Lens
- Helios 40 85mm f/1.5
- Light
- Low backlit sun through trees, no fill
Make it yours
Nothing here is baked into a LUT. Every control on the node is live, so you can pull the bloom back, warm it further, or take the vignette off entirely without rebuilding anything — the film-look breakdown shows what each control does and how far to push it.
If you want the same idea on a modern fast prime rather than a swirling vintage one, the first Golden Hour Portrait is a separate free PowerGrade built on a different frame, and its mask section covers halation, which this one does not use.
Golden Hour Portrait II is one Helios Grade node doing all of the work. The free version is watermarked and never expires — no account, no payment — so the grade costs nothing to judge on your own footage. Buying removes the watermark; any offer running is shown on the product page.