COLOR GRADING IN VIDEO EDITING

What is color grading in video editing?

Ever tried to replicate the work of a particular director or creator, rewatched your raw footage and been disappointed when it didn’t look the same? Balancing brightness, saturation and hue is pretty much impossible to do when you’re filming, even in a tightly controlled set. To get the final result you want, you need to use post-production editing techniques such as color grading

When you master this skill, you can use color grading to create your own style and express creative moods.

What does color grading mean?

Color grading is a post-production editing technique that allows creators to manipulate the visual style of a video project. This process is a tool used for stylistic or creative reasons, not to fix mistakes in the footage. To adjust colors so they reflect those captured by the human eye more closely, editors need to follow a color correction process. 

For high-quality results, your whole video should be color corrected before any color grading processes are applied. This will make sure all your footage is consistent and accurate to how a scene would look to the human eye in real life. So even if your video has been shot on different cameras with slightly different lighting and settings, the viewer won’t notice a difference. 

When you’re color correcting footage, the focus is on making it look ‘true to life’ by:

• Making sure the color hues look natural and realistic, with a profile that is consistent across the whole project

• Fixing exposure and luminescence — focus on making your talent’s skin hues as accurate as possible

• Adjusting the white balance to ensure it doesn’t impact on the ‘naturalness’ of your visuals e.g. so whites don’t look blue in your footage

• Manipulating contrast to ensure there’s a realistic difference between light and dark areas, with the details in a video being sharp and well defined
  
  

Why would you use color grading?

In the same way you’d use background music or sound effects, you can use grading to emphasize the action, emotion and style of your video. It’s a key tool you can use to express your visual creativity so you might want to familiarise yourself with color theory to understand how different colours elicit different emotions. For example, introducing warmer tones such as red or orange can have the effect of energizing a scene.

Visual storytelling

Adjusting the colors of a film to make it look hyperrealistic can enhance its quality, detail and artistry. For example, documentary makers may choose naturalistic color grading for their videos to enhance the beauty of the landscapes or wildlife they’ve captured. 

By choosing a consistent color profile, creators can set the overall tone of a project and enhance the narrative for viewers. Advanced colorists can also use these techniques to emphasize particular elements of a video, helping to direct attention to certain parts of a story. 

Emotional contrast

Colors have the potential to greatly influence on our mood. Blues can make us feel sad and melancholic while red can communicate energy or anger. Selecting a hue and leveling it off with white balance and contrast allows you to modify your color choice until it accurately reflects the emotion or energy you want to convey.

Genre creation

Certain grading styles and color palettes have become closely associated with genres. If you want to reflect a particular type of film, researching the color profiles used in your favorite examples of a genre is a good place to start. For sci-fi, you might choose more green-dominant ‘unnatural’ colors compared to a straight action film, where red would be a priority shade.

Understanding the dynamics of the color wheel is also helpful. Choosing complementary shades introduces larger contrasts than analogous hues, which are more useful for mood building. So choosing colors either next to or opposite each other on the wheel will create very different effects. 

 

How to do color grading 

The exact process for color grading will change depending on the type of software you use. However, the typical steps to add a visual style to a project are as follows:

• Color correct all your footage to make sure it’s consistent and looks as realistic as possible. This will ensure a higher quality result from your grading process

• Color match all your shots to your chosen scheme. Many forms of editing software will automatically use lookup tables to identify a primary palette and ensure all your footage complements it

• Once this is complete, match up each shot to ensure they look consistent. Using preset tools allows you apply your chosen color grading scheme to all your footage easily

• Then, you can start creating your style by adjusting your settings such as contrast and white balance. You’ll need to apply this grade to all your shots and double check for errors or elements that look out of place. 

There are lots of editing tools you can use to run color grading processes, including Cinema Grade, Chromatic and Adobe Premiere Pro.

How to do color grading in Premiere Pro

Premiere Pro has particular tools which make color grading processes straightforward. The following help creators achieve high quality results more easily: 

• The Lumetri Color panel which has all the main tools for adjusting color, contrast and brightness in clips without exporting or launching other software

• Adjustment layers which mean you can apply color grading settings to all the layers underneath, meaning you can make changes without affecting the original footage

• The Color Match function (which sits under Color Wheels and Match) and can automatically do shot-to-shot matching for you

• The Lumetri Scopes panel which displays graphs with information about the color palette present in your footage, so you can reference them as you make changes
  
  

How to learn advanced color grading techniques

As you color grade more projects, you’ll start to understand how different adjustments and palettes affect the tone of your final video. However, there are a few guidelines that can help you achieve a better quality finish as you develop your skills:

• Don’t go overboard. When it comes to changing colors, less is more. If you add in too much, it can become distracting and look unnatural

• Always check skin tones to make sure they look true to life. If they don’t, this is a big sign your color grading has gone too far 

• Get to know your RGB (Red, Green, Blue) values and how you can manipulate them to get the effect you want. Each pixel is made up of these lights, so understanding how to change these is a great way to level up your grading skills

Once you’ve got color grading skills under your belt, you’ll be able to tell your own creative story more effectively. Whether you want to create your own style or replicate that of the great directors, mastering this post-production technique is the first step to quality video. 

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