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Color plays a large part in the overall feel of a video or film, and color grading often acts as the final step in achieving a creator’s desired output.
With an abundance of prosumer camera gear available on the market today, creating high-quality video has never been easier; however, beginners often feel overwhelmed when it comes time for them to begin color grading their footage. There are many editing tools to choose from and it can be difficult to tell where to start. Fortunately, color grading is a subjective artform that allows you the freedom and creativity to try new things and see what resonates best with your footage, so it’s easy to jump in and learn through experience! Let’s get started.
Determine Your Input Color Space
The majority of cameras record light using a linear encoding method called Rec-709. This is a standardized color space intended for widespread use on consumer screened devices like cell phones and televisions. Most cameras record directly into this standard because it is the same color gamut that the video will be displayed in.
Higher-end video cameras can record using a logarithmic scale. Due to the way that light is processed by cameras when using a logarithmic scale, log footage has a higher dynamic range – or number of steps between light and dark – than linear footage. These properties of logarithmic encoding allow the camera to record more information within the highlights and shadows of an image, in exchange for a reduction in contrast and saturation. This results in a muted and washed-out looking image that is not fit for immediate display on screens; however, this dull image is perfect for color grading because it contains more color information that can be extracted from the image in the editing process.
Because of their reduced dynamic range, a camera filming in a linear color space will compensate by over or underexposing the bright and dark areas of the image, limiting the amount of light and color information captured. If possible, always record in a log format to retain as much information as possible for use later in the color grading process.
Normalize Your Footage If Needed
If you record your footage in a log format, you will need to convert the footage back to a standard color space to be displayed properly. This is called normalizing.
There are three main color spaces used by displays. The most common is Rec-709, used by most consumer screened devices. DCI-P3 is a standard used for film playback and offers a slightly wider spectrum than Rec-709. The widest color spectrum is Rec-2020, a new standard often used on high-end televisions and monitors.
To convert your log footage into one of these standardized color spaces, you will need to utilize an input LUT, or lookup table, developed by your camera manufacturer. These are often found on the manufacturer’s website.
Color Correcting
Ideally, each shot you take would be perfectly white balanced and evenly exposed across multiple shots; however, this is often difficult to achieve in fast-paced shooting environments, which is where color correcting comes into play. Color correcting is the process of ensuring that all footage is properly white balanced and that the tone matches well across all scenes.
White Balancing
White balancing refers to the process of ensuring that any pure white in your frame is actually displayed as true white and not a shade of blue, yellow, green or magenta. Image editing suites will allow you to manually adjust the temperature (yellow and blue) and tint (green and magenta) in your image to balance the white pixels of the footage.
Using a color checker before filming each scene is a great way to ensure even white balance across shots. Most editing suites have tools that will allow you to choose an area or pixel of a video frame that is supposed to be pure white and then the program will automatically compensate the color of the footage accordingly to ensure that the pixel, and any of the same color in the footage, displays as true white. By filming a color checker before beginning each scene, you can simply select the white section of the color checker in your footage using this editing tool, and your scene should have a proper white balance if it was not balanced correctly in camera.
Setting the Tone
Matching the tone across each clip in your video is very important. If one clip has a bright exposure and the other is very dark, there is going to be a jarring transition between the two clips. By adjusting the exposure, contrast, and saturation of your scenes, you can ensure that they complement each other.
Color Schemes
Now that your footage looks as true to life as possible, it’s time to get creative.
Choosing the correct color scheme for your video can have a direct impact on the audience’s perception of the narrative. Ideally, your film’s color scheme should be decided and integrated into the shoot itself and these colors should only need to be accentuated while processing the footage.
When deciding on a color scheme, it is important to know the intention behind your video. Ask yourself: what kind of mood am I trying to convey and what colors best represent that feeling or atmosphere? If you can answer this question and visualize how a particular scene and its colors would impact the overall feel of your film, your piece will have a more profound presence on screen.
Think of the The Matrix trilogy: it uses a dark green monochromatic color scheme, meaning the majority of colors within the movie are various shades of green. This gives the film its signature futuristic and sinister aesthetic, a look that elevates the tension within the narrative of the film. If each scene in The Matrix used a more vibrant color scheme, with more complementary colors, the intended feeling of being trapped in a virtual world of chaos would be less apparent to the viewer.
On the other hand, some films thrive on vibrant color schemes that are heightened by the color grading process. For example, Willy Wonka (2005) utilizes complementary colors like purple and gold or green and orange to emphasize the feeling of being in a magical candy factory.
Color grading in Willy Wonka was used to highlight complementary colors, retain color consistency across scenes, and refine the skin tone of each character (theasc.com). For example, color grading was used to desaturate Willy Wonka’s skin tone and create a ghostly pale blue tone to his face that contrasts with the vibrant world around him. This color-muted skin tone choice reflects Wonka’s internal darkness that becomes apparent throughout the film and contrasts it against his vibrant and bubbly outward persona in the colorful world around him. Using color in such a subtle way can add a layer of depth to a film without being distracting or too obvious to the viewer.
Color Grading
The ultimate of color grading is to emphasize the theme or narrative of a film so that it can be perceived by the audience without being a distraction; and with a color scheme in mind that complements the intended theme of your film, it’s time to begin the color grading process.
Video editing software suites offer in-depth adjustment of values such as contrast, saturation, and hue.
Advanced tools like vectorscopes allow for precise measurement of color within an image. By using vectorscopes, you can visualize the color spectrum of an image, or portion of an image, and balance the RGB values within that selection. This is helpful in confirming that the skin tone of a subject matches the narrow natural color spectrum that skin tones fall within. Vectorscopes also help combat the variation of color display across different monitor models, as only high-end monitors can display an accurate color gamut such as sRGB. A colorist can use a vectorscope to ensure that no shade is too dominant in the footage that they are grading (unless intended otherwise), regardless of the monitor that they are using.
Creative LUTs are preset lookup tables that apply a predetermined color scheme, group of colors, or image value to your footage. Using LUTs, either your own or one developed by a third party, is a great way to quickly grade many scenes at once. The advantage of this technique is that only small adjustments are then needed to match the color grade across each scene, as opposed to applying the same adjustments to each clip individually.
Careful adjustment to these color values using aforementioned tools will allow a colorist to reach the finished product that we see on screens.
Conclusion
Know your camera, the color space you are recording in, and the intended output that your video will be displayed in. Record in log format if possible and have a color scheme in mind when filming your video. Use the tools available in your editing suite to refine the footage to match your desired vision. Color grading is a subjective artform and it is ultimately up to you to decide what looks best for your footage. Get out there, try new things, and have fun!
