so this has been driving me crazy for a while now. i shoot d-log on my mini 4 pro and do all my grading in resolve, ive got a decent monitor that i calibrated with a colorimeter a while back. the footage looks great when im sitting at my desk. nice contrast, colors pop but not oversaturated, highlights are pulled back. im pretty happy with it.

then i export and watch it on my phone and it looks completely washed out and weird, or sometimes weirdly contrasty depending on the phone. posted one to instagram and someone commented that it looked desaturated. its embarrasing because i spent like two hours on the grade.

ive tried changing my export settings a few times but im not sure if its a color space issue or a gamma issue or what. currently exporting h264 at around 80mbps with rec709 settings. my monitor might be set to too high a brightness i dont know. anyone dealt with this?

classic monitor brightness problem combined with color space tagging probably. two things to check ? first, resolve has a setting for the output color space and if thats not tagged as rec709 the phone or instagram will interpret it wrong. in your project settings make sure the timeline color space and output are both rec709-A (the A version handles gamma correctly for most displays). second thing, phone screens are almost always way brighter than you think and have their own contrast enhancement stuff baked in. try doing a chunk of your grade while also having your phone plugged in right next to you and checking as you go. annoying workflow but it catches the problem early.

also instagram recompresses everything to oblivion and that can make grades look muddy. worth testing by just airdropping the file straight to your phone before blaming the grade itself

the washed out thing on instagram is almost always the color profile not being embedded correctly in the export. resolve can be weirdly finicky about this. also are you on a mac? because mac monitors have their own color profile layered on top and sometimes that throws things off when you export. i had the exact same issue and it turned out my monitor profile was set to display P3 which made everything look great on screen but totally wrong everywhere else. switched it back to sRGB for editing and the problem basically went away