John Daro

John Daro is a Senior Digital Intermediate (DI) colorist at Warner Bros. Post Production Creative Services, a division of Warner Bros. Discovery. He has supervised the finishing and color graded many feature films, television pilots, commercials, and music videos for clients including all the major studios in addition to independent productions.

Daro started his career at the film lab FotoKem. His first notable achievement was architecting a direct-to-disk dailies pipeline. From that role, he moved on to film scanning-recording and, with the DI process's creation, his current position as a finishing colorist. His past jobs gave him a mastery over color transforms and he started to couple those strengths with the art of cinematography. He continued to pioneer post-production techniques including 3D conversion and the early days of HDR imaging. As a founding team member of their digital film services department, he helped FotoKem achieve its status as one of the premier post houses in the film and television post-production industry.

In 2013, Daro was recognized for his work with an HPA nomination for Outstanding Color Grading on Behind the Candelabra .

In 2015, he was again awarded an HPA Outstanding Color Grading nomination for his work on The Boxtrolls.

John became a member of the Visual Effects Society in May of 2016.

After 17 years with the FotoKem team, Daro transitioned to Warner Bros. He continues to push the boundaries of Post-production by developing new methods to deliver Filmmaker’s artistry toward an ever-evolving media landscape.

In 2018, John joined the Motion Picture Editors Guild and was the first “Finishing Colorist” to do so.

In 2019, Daro created a technique using machine vision to auto-segment images into mattes that can be used for color grading or stereoscopic conversion.

In 2020, building on his AI model, John invented MatchGrader, a process where an image is artistically color-graded based on a given reference image.

Created in 2021, Daro was a founding member and officer of the Colorists Society Hollywood.

In late 2021, the inaugural FilmLight Color Awards recognized his work with a nomination for Tom and Jerry.

He continues to push the boundaries of where creativity and technology overlap with the use of Filmlight's Baselight and BMD's DaVinci Resolve platforms. Available in Burbank, New York, and London or remotely worldwide.