Colour Grading Overview/Example

Following on from my post on colour correction, I thought I’d post a quick example of colour grading. In the image below I have taken the original shot of the city street in the day and altered it to look like dusk.

Although there’s a million and one effects and tools you can use to colour grade, I only used three seperate effects on my image to acheive the look of the sun setting behind the buildings. Firstly was a sunset flare from Knoll Light Factory. Although not a colour correction tool per se, some of the flares can be combined with your lighting effects to achieve some excellent results. The second effect was the levels effects used to crush the blacks and whites as discussed in the previous post. Last but not least I added a curves adjustment and boosted the red channel and lowered the blue channel to give the feel of the evening sun shining on the buildings.

See what you think…

There’s usually two main reasons why you might want to colour grade your footage. Firstly is to simulate different lighting conditions, like in my example, and the second is to give a different feel or look to your film. Notice the slight green tinge to everything in The Matrix? Colour Grading.

Colour grading on film is more commonly referred to as colour timing and will usually be done in the lab. Digital colour correction can be achieved in the majority of editing systems and the two most common programs in mainstream use are Apple Colour and Colour Finesse.

I might do a more in-depth post on colour grading in the future, but just wanted to give you a quick overview in the meantime.

The original image of the New York street was provided by the friendly guys over at VideoCopilot.

www.stencilmedia.co.uk

The Importance of Colour Correction

In my opinion, the quickest, cheapest and easiest way to give your film a higher production value is colour correction. Done correctly it instantly adds more depth to your footage and a more natural colour. But what do we mean by colour correction?

Every light source has a different colour temperature depending on what type it is and the sensor in your camcorder see each of these lights slightly differently. So what may be seen by the human eye as bright white is seen as something slightly different in the camera. That’s why nearly all digital video cameras have a ‘white balance’ feature. This essentially tells the camera what is pure white in the scene and forces it to adjust all the other colours accordingly.

Colour correction is the process (either in camera or during post production) of altering your footage to look the same under similar conditions and be a true representation of what the human eye sees. A scene you shot two weeks apart in slightly different light but that’s meant to be part of the same scene in your final film wouldn’t look right if the colours were off.

Even if you’ve shot the scene in one take and all the colours look faithful, it’s important to alter the levels to give a more natural look to the footage. Below are two images, the one on the left has not been colour corrected and the one on the right has. See the difference?

The difference is like night and day. The blacks are blacker, the whites are whiter, the colours pop more and there is more detail in the whole shot. This was acheived easily by altering the levels in After Effects, however most non linear editing programs such as iMovie or Windows Movie Maker will give you this feature. Each of them work differently so your best bet is to use Google to search for “Colour Correction in your video software” and see what comes up.

A lot of new and inexperienced film makers skip this important step in the production of their footage and their films suffer because of it. Correct white balance on set will remove a lot of the issues, but that’s only half the trick. It’s easily overlooked though as at first glance the footage looks perfectly acceptable; it’s only when you see the big difference that good colour correction makes that you never look back!

Colour correction isn’t difficult but can take a while to master and each shot will need to be altered differently. Colour Grading is a whole different story and that’s an art-form! There’s a whole host of information on colour theory and colour tempratures, but that’s beyond the scope of this post… and my knowledge! I don’t know the exact science, I just know it works which is good enough for me! Once you’ve got the hang of it, short sequences will take only a few minutes to complete and hardly add any time to your rendering.

Do you colour correct your footage? Is this the first you’ve heard of it or are you an old hand at it? Would be great to hear your experiences.

www.stencilmedia.co.uk