What is colour grading?
Colour grading is the process of editing the colours in your film with a stylistic lens. It’s not to be confused with colour correcting, which is the processing of fixing the colours in your film so that what is visible on the screen matches what you see in real life. Colour correction usually happens before colour grading.
Why use colour grading?
Colour grading is an optional process, a chance to bring a particular aesthetic to your film, or to heighten narrative or tension through tonal choices.
How do you decide your aesthetic?
You can say a lot with the colour grading choices you make in your film. You can use it to enhance the narrative and create mood. If you don’t have a clear vision of the colour grading of your film, it might help to consider the following.
Backstage says that the most common associations for different colours are:
- Red: passion, anger, power, love
- Orange: sociability, joy, success, courage
- Yellow: youth, illness, poverty
- Green: greed, evil, nature, unease
- Blue: sadness, calm, intellectualism, loneliness
- Pink: femininity, naivety, beauty, sweetness
- Purple: power, fantasy, other-worldliness, desire
What are the steps of colour grading?
- Choose your colour grading software. Options include DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere Pro, Lightworks, Final Cut Pro and Magic Bullet.
- Colour correct your film first so that you are working from a neutral canvas.
- Begin with a primary colour grade, which means adjusting the colour for the entire image.
- Your secondary colour grade means isolating specific parts of the image, or particular objects and grading only those.
- LUTs, short for look-up tables, can be applied to the whole film within seconds to ensure that your films looks consistent throughout.
Want to find out more? Take a look at these resources:
https://vimeo.com/blog/post/color-grading-vs-color-correction-explained/
https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/color-grading-explained-75674/
https://nofilmschool.com/color-grading
https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-color-grade-video-footage
https://www.filmsupply.com/articles/cinematic-color-grading/