COLOR GRADING TIPS & TRICKS
Color grading is an integral aspect of the video production process - one that has the capacity to bring a director's vision to life. It's a technique that involves manipulating and enhancing the colors within a video to create a specific look or feel. Proper color grading can also contribute to the tone, atmosphere, and message of the project - or create new ones. Whether it's a commercial, a music video, or a feature film, color grading can be used to influence a variety of moods and emotions. By adjusting hues, saturation, brightness levels, and a dozen other parameters, video producers can create a vibrant and energetic feel for a commercial, or add a somber and introspective tone to a documentary. It's a subtle yet impactful technique that can take your video production to the next level.
Beyond just adding visual appeal to the final product, color grading can also be used to guide the audience's attention, reinforce the narrative, and add depth to the story being told. The art of color grading is not just about adjusting the colors in a video, it's about using color to tell a story and evoke emotions. When our video production team sets out to create a unique piece of visual content, we understand that choosing a complementary color grading scheme is imperative to elicit the intended emotional response. At the end of the day, most video projects are really selling emotion. For example, when asked to drive web traffic, we may want to focus on promoting a feeling of curiosity and mystery to entice the viewer to seek more information. If asked to promote a charity, we may decide to evoke the empathy of our audience to promote a feeling of giving. Regardless of the intended emotional response, color grading plays an incredibly important role in achieving that goal. Even at the most basic level, proper color grading is an essential part of finalizing your piece. No one is going to take a principal actor’s words seriously if they look like a Smurf or an Oompa Loompa.
In this blog, we’ll delve deeper into the art of color grading and explore how it can be used to elevate video production projects. From understanding the basics of color grading to exploring more advanced techniques, we will cover everything you need to know to take your video productions to the next level.
SETTING THE MOOD
Color grading has the power to set the tone of your concept - in fact, your color grading may be the concept itself. In any case, it can’t hurt to start thinking about the look and feel of your color in pre-production. Without a sense of visual direction, your final product can lose the creative juice that you may have envisioned during pre-production. For an example of how wildly color grading can affect the tone of your video, take a look at these two pieces of work from our portfolio:
You should notice a pretty significant difference in “vibe” between these two pieces. The blues and greens of the Frontpoint video generate a more relaxed, approachable, and at times fun tone - whereas the reds and blacks of the Corvette ad imply intensity, boldness, and power. Keep these principles in mind moving forward, and you’ll be on your way to an impactful video.
COLOR SPACES
Let’s get into the nuts & bolts of color correction & grading - first, you need to select a color space. Selecting the right color space all depends on where the content will be seen by your audience. For projects intended for viewing on the internet, you should start with a rec.709 space. Rec.709 color spaces are optimized for digital displays - in other words, these will look the best on computer monitors, televisions, mobile devices, and so on. Using rec.709 also gives us the most dynamic color range. It allows more granularity when color grading a project since it allows for a higher level of contrast and saturation. The lion’s share of our work is slated for the internet so we mostly live in the rec.709 space, but we also employ the rec.2020 color space when necessary. Rec.2020 is better when your intended viewing space is based on equipment - specifically devices meant to display in Ultra HD, HDR, or 4K. So, color grading for a specific ultra HD or HDR device would necessitate starting with a rec.2020 color space. Once you have a starting point, we can begin reviewing the footage for color correction.
COLOR CORRECTION
A common misconception is that color correction and color grading are one and the same. In reality, color correction is an important first step before you can begin the more aesthetic-based process of color grading. Think of color correction as the process of getting your footage to appear as it would to the human eye.
In no particular order, color correction involves making the following adjustments (among many others):
Exposure: If your footage is over or under-exposed, you will want to correct that. Adjusting your exposure can correct the light, middle, and dark tones - or overall brightness - of your footage.
Saturation: If your colors are too intense (or not intense enough) adjustments to saturation may be necessary to normalize your shadows, mid-tones, and highlights.
Contrast: Adjusting your contrast is an important step - contrast is essentially the difference between the darkest and lightest colors in your footage. Bringing the contrast up can make your image more discernible and less gray or foggy.
Skin Tones: If your footage comes out and your subject looks like a vampire (or the aforementioned Oompa Loompa), you may have to do some skin tone correction. The perfect tool to help you achieve this is the vectorscope/color scope tool in your video editing software. The vectorscope has a skin tone line built in to allow you to correct your subject’s skin tones to achieve an accurate look - this skin tone line is based on the scope’s analysis of the color space. Therefore, it depends on the math - not your eyeballs - to achieve the proper look. And unfortunately, unless you are an expert colorist (and even then, maybe) your eyes can deceive you when it comes to color correction and grading.
White Balance: Ah, every editor’s best friend. Perhaps one of the most important steps in the entire color correction process is adjusting the white balance. This allows you to, yes - balance the white point in your footage. This is especially necessary if you captured your footage with irregular lighting, temperature, movement, focus, and so on. Correcting the white balance is a crucial step to get you to the baseline you’re looking for prior to color grading.
Once color correction is complete, you can dive into grading. Our team will typically save color grading for last, because like music, it can heavily influence the tone of the project. This is the last chance to change the emotional tone of the piece before it is finalized.
LUT UP!
Color grading choices will depend on the goal of your project, but adjusting the look and feel of your piece can be as easy as applying a LUT. Simply put, LUTs, or Look Up Tables, are preset looks for your footage. Input the LOG file, and out comes the color grading edits of your dreams. If you want a gritty grain, there is a LUT for that. If you want to mimic a popular TV show or movie, there is a LUT for that too. The realization is, if you can think of it, you can probably find a LUT that will truly transform your footage. While LUTs may be a great start, we try not to rely too heavily on them, even when we create them. Every project needs to be assessed and graded on an individual basis to promote the emotional response needed for that specific project, rather than employing a “plug and play” approach. Using LUTs exclusively will leave a lot of that potential on the table.
STRIKE A MATCH
One of the most important facets of the color grading process is ensuring that you achieve a cohesive look across your entire project. While all of your shots may not be graded exactly the same, keeping a singular vision when moving from shot to shot will help you keep the visual identity of your video project uniform across the board. Since (depending on the project) you may have different locations - and therefore different lighting - distinct changes may have to be made between shots to account for these differences.
A common process for achieving this uniformity involves choosing a “hero shot” to serve as a baseline. Once you have color corrected and graded the hero shot, you may use it as a reference to color correct and grade the remaining shots in your project. While this is a great starting point, do not rely too heavily on the hero shot since (broken record alert) every project is different and may necessitate slight differences in color from shot to shot. In other words - find what works for you!
A PASSING GRADE
To get the most out of your color grading, remember a few key things:
Good color grading should be subtle. You don’t have to bathe the entire scene in blue to show that the emotional tone is meant to be sad. Pick key elements and be strategic with your grading choices.
Calibrate your display properly. There is a wealth of resources online to help you with this - but if your display is not calibrated properly, your final product may appear wonky to your intended audience.
Don’t get too LUT-happy. LUTs are great for providing a starting point, but don’t rely on a pre-canned configuration to tell your story. After achieving a base look with a LUT, play with your settings to find the perfect grading effects that hit the emotional tones that are right for your project.
Prepare for the process. Remembering the color correcting and grading processes during production can save you an exceptional amount of time. No amount of correction or grading will fix a shot that was washed out on capture. Lighting is everything when it comes to post-production edits.
Do your research. There is a lot of science behind the correlation of certain colors with certain emotions. Understanding these relationships can really enhance the effectiveness of your color grading. Remember, color can mean different things to different cultures. Red may mean passion in Western society, but something completely different in others. Choose wisely, young padawan.
At the end of the day, color grading comes down to the needs of the project and the creativity of the editor. Make choices that fit your project’s emotional tone and trust your gut, not your LUT!
We hope this has been helpful. Check out the rest of our blog for more useful tidbits, or explore our portfolio for more examples of effective color grading - and go out and create something amazing!
