Colour Grading in Video – Colorist Notes

Colour grading is often misunderstood as tinting a video some particular shade. It isn’t that. It’s the process of taking the colour image and getting it as technically sound as possible — and then, optionally, pushing it further towards something more effective or more accurate.

Let’s look at it using an ordinary shot.

An ordinary shot from Bratislava. A summer shower had just passed through.

The basic level is colour correction. Contrast and colour are set to “normal”.

At the second level we start adjusting things that serve the director’s intent. For instance, the neon backpack is toned down and the background is darkened to bring the subject forward. The colour of the water and the trees is adjusted.

Finally, you can run an effect processor over the shot. In this case it’s a variation on orange-and-teal grading. Grading like this is used to achieve a cinematic look.

Or you run a filter over the image that produces colour and tonal rendition looking as though the shot came off film.

Or you apply a treatment that creates the impression of a night scene. Current software can track moving objects fairly accurately, so in post you can even create the illusion that the cars had their headlights on.

A look at the workspace in DaVinci Resolve. In the frame you can see the mask layer I used to darken the background on the right. Colour grading can be done in many video applications, though. Every editor handles basic correction. But advanced grading techniques, various masks and effects already call for professional tools.

Grading is essentially a form of retouching.

Not retouching a photograph, but retouching video.

Colour grading makes it possible to remove various defects from the image — blown-out areas, for example, or blemishes in the skin. Today it’s used on virtually all professional video.

You can shoot a video on a mobile phone, and after colour work the footage can look rather as though it had been captured by a conventional cinematographic process onto celluloid. Of course, a phone won’t deliver the same shot as a Hollywood crew with several million euros’ worth of equipment. But for ordinary work, phone footage can serve even a professional production — in television news or a reportage, for instance.

I mention shooting on a phone as more of an extreme example. Yet it isn’t that far from reality: in many respects, today’s phone shoots better than a professional television camera did twenty years ago.

Various ways of vandalising the image are currently fashionable. You can download, or set up yourself, all sorts of colour casts and colour reduction. We see something similar in photos on Instagram. Vandalism is the only word I’m willing to use for the kinds of grading that reduce the number of colours in an image. They often turn footage into something that could have been shot on interwar stock.

I wouldn’t recommend using stylistic devices for their own sake.

Grading should always serve the intent of the film, and serve it with judgement. Just because we can turn an image into a strange washed-out mess doesn’t mean we should.

An example of how I graded a video. So that the viewer notices the figure immediately, the surroundings are darkened.

Another example of how an ordinary shot can be made a little more vivid. You can see these shots in the video below — the intent there was to go wild with colour.