What is color grading?
Color grading is the process of adjusting the tones and colors of film to create a certain mood and atmosphere for your production. Nearly every professional film utilizes color grading to control the levels of highlights, shadows, and other features and especially since it has become so affordable and accessible recently with software like Davinci Resolve and Adobe Premiere.
The Process
First off, you want to check the technology with which you're shooting. If you're like me, you're using a DSLR (a Canon Rebel T3i in my situation). Typically these cameras are already programmed for the beginner user, a middle-aged, middle-income Indian father who wants to show off his big camera to his friends, regardless of the lacking experience he has with cameras. So the camera is already preset to have a higher sharpness and contrast to produce ready to go videos without necessary color correction or color grading. Unfortunately, if you're trying to produce a more professional film, these presets sacrifice the detail in the footage to create sharper film. Instead, what we're going to need to do is to select a neutral or flat preset. Or if you're feeling a bit more extreme, shoot in RAW. The result is shots which do a better job of preserving the original detail, but absolutely require color grading and color correction unless you want extremely washed-out footage.
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| Before and after color grading (The Martian 2015) |
Color Grading
Now the actual process of color grading is an extensive process that is often the responsibility of entire studios for blockbuster productions and is a crucial step that should not be overlooked. The actual process can take hours depending on the level of detail in establishing a certain mood that the filmmaker wants. So we'll just go over the overall process briefly. In short, there are a few elements you want to consider.
1. The highlights and shadows - typically many mainstream productions go for the orange and blue color scape with shadows carrying a blue tint and highlights carrying an orange tint
2. The contrast, LUTS, and RGB levels - In post-production, a variety of tools are used to correct the footage and bring back the color lost while shooting with a neutral camera preset. LUTS allow for a film to carry a consistent look throughout its entirety and often use algorithms to automatically adjust levels. The contrast is often something that is changed in post-production as well since shooting in neutral means the footage has almost no contrast. RGB levels allow for better management of skin tones and can help bring warmth or coolness to your film.
3. Vectorscopes and Colorscopes - Unless you have an extremely large budget, chances are you're not going to be focusing your budget on post-production software. So unless you're already a professional PC gamer, your monitor (if you even have one separate from your laptop) is likely not to have a great color range. This means the footage you see on the monitor is likely to be altered slightly and may appear different if you plan on presenting your film on a different device and especially a theater. Colorscopes and vectorscopes provided by software like Davinci Resolve provide graphs and analytics for you to understand the color range of your footage graphically rather than subjectively through superficial visual analysis. Learning how to use these color scopes can give you much more control with how your film actually turns out and a more accurate interpretation of the color range.
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| Color and vector scopes in Davinci Resolve |
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