Top Tips For Basic Colour Correction – Colour grading is the final step in the post-production service, which gives your video the sparkle and personality that depicts the image of your brand. But Colour grading and Colour correction, whilst essentially using the same tools, have two clearly different goals.
Colour grading refers to the creative choice a colourist makes to stylize a film. Whilst correction is just that, its is a correction for video of the white balance, exposure, colour temperature or its to match footage from different cameras that have slightly different colour renditions. Unifying shots output from different cameras is an important on any project.
Know your tools
There are many tools a colourist must use to not only make changes but to monitor that changes are accurate. Using Da Vinci resolve you just need a powerful computer to run the free software but what is often overlooked is n accurate monitor. Most programs and even non-linear editors have built in analysis tools, histograms, and wave for monitors, vector scopes. Getting dedicated hardware versions of these tools is also an option, and great fun to play with. Having a tactile interaction with the module gives a while new dimension to the process. Not only are these tools essential to colour correction but they are also the most common tools to broadcast production.
When you first get started with your grade its easy to exaggerate and push the image too far. If your film is going to have a look, ask yourself why. Why do you want to increase the contrast or decrease the saturation? Are you doing it because it is complementing the creative themes of your video or are you simply doing it because you can?
A popular look in blockbuster films is the orange and teal palate. Which uses the basic idea of complimentary colours to push skin tones into orange and shadows into teal. So whilst it may be very tempting to grade this way, it may not suit the video content at all.
Colour grading is a very subjective art form that relies on intrinsic control of the grading suite. If you double as a dit on set you should be fully involved with the camera department to make sure your exposure is consistent. Colour correction has come a long way but once the details are gone they are gone. There are three key technical terms to be aware of. Log, Raw and Rec.709.
Log is normal recorded video with a flatter colour profile. Essentially, the entire dynamic range of the camera is squeezed into the limited space available to the video format requiring manual colour correction or what’s known as a LUT to expand it back out to a normal range. The advantage of this is that you get to bring down highlights increase shadows and manipulate much more of the tonal detail.
However you are still limited by the fact that the video has been recorded in a standard video format. That brings us to RAW. RAW is the actual light data as captured by the cameras sensor before being converted to a video format. What this means is that ISO can be adjusted after capture and you have more control over highlights, midtones and shadows because its literally RAW data. But these two formats usually get reduced to one common format – Rec.709. This is the standard colour space that most HD video that is recorded and displayed by.