If you have worked on photographs before, you should have seen the potions for the colors and brightness. You might have even worked on them, changing the tones till you found the one befitting your photograph. The process of improving the appearance of a media through color and tones is called color grading.
You may be doing color grading every day without even realizing that you’re doing it. Color grading is a central part of content creation. It’s also how videographers adjust the colors of their footage to achieve a visual mood or tone.
Color grading is the series of the process by how you enhance or alter the color of a motion picture, video image, or still image. In the past, it was called color timing, when the professionals did film edits manually without the help of special software.
Professional color grading is more of a technical skill in filmmaking and usually involves looking at what color grading is in the appropriate video format. They help create the mood and tone through which the director can convey his ideas about the setting and characters. For example, a higher level of contrast and spookiness would be a horror film, while lighter tones and contrast would be best for romantic comedies.
Examples of Color Grading
Color grading is a vital element in the content creation world. It has a lot of usages and would be directly influenced by the grading specialist’s preferences of colors. The places where color grading is used are:
- Still Photography
- Movies/ Films and videos
- Advertisement posters and pictures
What software is used for color grading?
There are a lot of tools that editors could use for color grading. Many of the tools are multi-tasking programs that come together with other filmmaking issues like music, VFX, and video. However, there is also quite some industry favorite software made for a specific task.
Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve is one of the most popular software used for motion pictures. It has an advanced selection of a wide range of options on various preset data. It also has VFX editing capabilities that make it a powerhouse creative tool for most professional.
Snapspeed is software perfect for photographers. It has a wide range of tools available to meet every demand related to color grading a still life photo. Snapseed is the perfect multi-tasking tool for photographers in both android and IOS with various options and capabilities.
Color-correction vs. Color-grading
The terms color-correction and color-grading have interloping properties, so people tend to make a mistake to think that they are the same. There are quite a lot of differences between these two terms.
Color correction includes the touch-ups like editing out blemishes or removing dust particles that made their way into the shot. Even the work of an amateur can be categorized as color-correction. Color-grading, on the other hand, is more professional. It is about editing the visual for stylistic purposes to give the image a particular feel and mood. Color grading makes use of render CGs that allows the maximum amount of flexibility in all color processes.
The 4 Steps of the Color Grading Workflow
Step 1: Color Correction
The first step that comes to the color grading stage is color correction. As we mentioned earlier, it is merely a simple primary touch up. This step plays the role of ensuring that all of your shots have a matching and consistent look. It’s possible to do this step manually, but too much time and effort will be consumed. So professional software is preferred to increase work efficiency.
Step 2: Color Grade Your Footage
Once you are done correcting all the clips on your footage, you need to work while looking at the entire footage as a whole in your next stage. Although editors can do this step manually, professionals choose to use digital programs to do this process.
This is an important step to ensure that there’s no single shot breaking the clip’s overall consistency. If there is, the only way to correct it is to move back and use a reference image for the sequence that you can use to match all of your shots to.
The aim of this step isn’t to match every shot color for color. Its main point is to find the contrast points that are continuous enough so that the audience won’t find transitions between clips jarring.
Step 3: Matching Skin tones.
Skin tones are an important part that needs to be controlled. It is something that our brains are most sensitive to. Monitor calibration and ambient lighting can alter the way you see the video being displayed. To ensure that this does not happen, a lot of effort is made after getting the correct and most befitting skin tone.
Vectroscopes are often used to get the perfect color for your tone. It usually shows what color tones are available and how saturated they are.
Step 4: Final Color grading
Once all the steps have been followed, in the last step, your work is to check the color schemes one last time. If they end up okay, you can start to develop the stylistic color grading. While enhancing the colors, factors like contrast and balance need to be kept in mind. You can keep twitching and adjusting these factors’ levels until you find the right adjustment that will suit your clip or photo.
Conclusion
Professional color grading is an important element in post-production. For any videographer who wants to publish quality content, they need to think of many factors. The frames, picture quality, tone, color contrast, etc., all play a major role in attracting the audience. That’s exactly where color grading plays its role. Whether for films, photographs, or even advertisement posters, it is important to hire an appropriately experienced color specialist.
