The Color Management panel in Project Settings decides how DaVinci Resolve interprets your footage before you grade it. Getting it right once saves a lot of confusion. Here is what the main options do and when to use each.
Open Project Settings (gear icon, bottom-right) → Color Management. The key control is Color science at the top.
The classic mode. Resolve does not auto-convert anything; you handle log conversion yourself with a Color Space Transform or a LUT. Choose this if you want full manual control or you are following LUT-based tutorials.
You tell Resolve your Input color space (or set it per clip), a Timeline color space, and an Output color space, and it converts everything automatically. Great for mixed cameras — set Timeline and Output to Rec.709 / Gamma 2.4 and every clip is normalized for you.
In Color Managed mode, right-click any clip on the Color page → Input Color Space to override its camera profile. This is how you fix a clip that came in looking wrong.
New to grading or mixing cameras? Use Color Managed — it is the most forgiving. Following LUT tutorials or want manual control? Use DaVinci YRGB and convert with a node. Neither is "more professional"; they are just different workflows.
DaVinci YRGB does no automatic color conversion — you convert log footage yourself with a node or LUT. DaVinci YRGB Color Managed (RCM) converts every clip from its input color space to your chosen timeline and output space automatically.
It is a great default if you shoot on multiple cameras or are still learning, because it normalizes everything to Rec.709 for you. If you prefer manual LUT-based grading, the standard DaVinci YRGB mode gives you more direct control.
For standard online video, Rec.709 with Gamma 2.4 (or Gamma 2.2 for web-leaning delivery). Use a wider space only if you are mastering for HDR.