Metro Portrait: a free DaVinci Resolve PowerGrade for F-Log portraits
4 min readUpdated
Metro Portrait is a free PowerGrade for DaVinci Resolve: a portrait look built for F-Log footage, graded in a metro station's mixed artificial light. This page has the before and after, the settings the footage was shot with, the download, and what to adjust to make the grade your own.
The look
The frame below is straight from the camera on the left and through the finished PowerGrade on the right. The grade keeps skin natural against the station's green tile, holds the red of the top without letting it run, and leaves the highlights clean.
F-Log, ungradedHow the footage was shot
Knowing what the grade was built on helps predict how it lands on your own footage. Everything here was shot on one small setup, handheld, in available light:
Camera settings
- Camera
- Fujifilm X-T3
- Lens
- Viltrox 23mm
- Profile
- F-Log
- Frame rate
- 60 fps
- Shutter
- 1/100
- ISO
- 800, rising to 5600 in the darker parts of the station
The closer your source sits to this — log footage, artificial light, skin as the subject — the closer the PowerGrade will land out of the box. On footage shot in daylight or on another camera's log curve it is a starting point rather than a finish: apply it, then rebalance.
Download the PowerGrade
metro-portrait.drx · 80 KB — a DaVinci Resolve PowerGrade still, exported from Resolve Studio 21.
Install it in Resolve
- 1Install Helios Grade first, and restart Resolve so it picks the plugin up.
- 2In the Color page, open the Gallery and select the PowerGrades album in the still albums list.
- 3Right-click inside the gallery, choose Import, and pick
metro-portrait.drx. - 4With your clip selected, right-click the imported still and choose Apply Grade.
- 5Open the Helios Grade node and check that Step 1's Input Color Space matches what the node is actually receiving. The grade was built with the footage converted to Rec.709 in front of the plugin — if your pipeline hands it something else, set the control to match. It is a control, not a detection: the plugin cannot read your timeline's colour space by itself.
Free, watermarked, no expiry
Metro Portrait's entire look lives in 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.
Make it yours
We like clean footage, so Grain sits at zero in this PowerGrade. If your taste runs grainier, raise Grain Strength on the Helios Grade node and it folds straight into the look — the film-look breakdown walks through what each grain control does.
Nothing in the grade is baked into a LUT, so every control on the node is still live. Treat the PowerGrade as a starting position: pull the overall strength back for something quieter, warm or cool the balance for the location you actually shot in, and rebalance skin first — it is the reference everything else in this look was judged against.
Metro Portrait is one Helios Grade node doing all of the work — the same controls the other tutorials here walk through one by one. The free version is watermarked with no expiry, so the PowerGrade costs nothing to judge on your own footage.