What is Color Grading?
What is Color Grading?
What is Color Grading? If you researching this topic you probably learning photography or filmmaking. If you ever watched behind the scenes of any movie, you probably heard the phrase color grading. What is it really mean? We know what color correction does, are we? If not, well…Color correction is the basic correction of the image or video that needs to be balanced. By balancing the image or video, we generally adjust exposure and sometimes color temperature. This process is called a color correction. In fact! Every color grading starts with proper color correction and we are going to find out why!
Let’s pretend that we are filmmakers and we got our first camera, called a few friends, and shot some cool footage. If you novice filmmaker, you probably didn’t pay attention, and your white balance, aka color tint is all over the place. It was a sunny day but your footage looks very blue and dark. What to do? In that kind of situation, we use color correction to fix an image or video. Generally speaking from my extensive experience, it’s not a good practice intentionally to rely on post-production to fix footage or pictures later in the program. Even if you shooting RAW, you always want to have as much proper information hitting your camera sensor as possible. I know a few people that always lack adjusting their camera settings and rely on heavily post-production to fix an image. It’s a terrible practice and nobody should be doing that!
The example below is a badly shot image, we can see colors are all over the place, it doesn’t look natural and is just bad overall.
Bad image with wrong white balance and wrong exposure adjustment
Let’s adjust few things such as color temperature and exposure to make image look right. We can see how huge difference it makes to adjust settings properly. So this is your typical color correction. Its a very important process to any work, whether you are photographer or filmmaker.
Fixed Image after Color Correction Process. Color Corrected using Natural Origami LUTs for Blackmagic Gen 5
What is Color Grading
Now that we know what color correction does, let’s finally answer the question! What is Color Grading? A color grading is a process, where color-corrected images get altered to the point to give it a creative look and feel. The first example I immediately thought of is the original Matrix. At the time when the movie came out, the whole green tint was something different that nobody have seen before. The movie was heavily color graded to immerse viewers into the alternative reality of the Matrix. This process is called Color Grading. Below example of what Color Grading can do and how it affects the mood of the scene. As we can see, mood and feel drastically changes depending on the color palette of the color grading.
Color Graded using Origami Color Film LUTs for Blackmagic Gen 5
The Color Grading process is nearly identical for pictures and film, however, obviously, it has a slightly different order and process. Ideally, a photographer or filmmaker, wants to have a final look in mind before shooting, so the image or film can be altered way before you going to start filming it. There are a few major factors that come into play. First of all color grading will depend on what kind of movie you have, certain colors cannot work for certain types, aka drama, horror, comedy, etc. Each of those film genres has its own color palette that you need to respect before filming. The wardrobe, lighting, and set decoration also play major roles in the process. All of the listed above are chosen way before filming starts based on the color palette cinematographer creates with the film colorist. In order to achieve desired color grading in post-production (in software) those things need to be addressed before filming starts. Wardrobe, lighting, set decoration, a genre all come to play when it’s time to start color grading your project.
Color Grading is a very destructive process to the image and film, in some cases, heavy grading may create unpleasant artifacts, that’s why it’s very important to achieve as much of your final look in-camera as possible before you will start degrading the image further down in post-production.
Currently, there are two major programs for Color Grading that are used primarily in Hollywood and worldwide filmmaking. The most widely used is called Davinci Resolve, currently, we are on version 18 of this program. The second one, which has top end reputation but is very very expensive, is called Baselight. There are many others, however, in the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what you use, the final result is what matters. Learn whatever program that you can and have fun creating!
