What Is Color Grading?: What Is The Need For Color Grading?

Have you ever seen a commercial or feature film with a specific look? Usually, commercials attract people because of their colors. But when we did our project, our footage looked different. Do you also wonder why your project looks less attractive than others? So the reason behind this is 'Color Grading'. Sometimes Color Grading is thought of as Photoshop for moving images. It is a step in our image crafting pipeline where we manipulate an image to make it look a particular way.

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It is the most crucial step for every single video because it will help you understand how you will craft more compelling images. If you also want to know more about color grading and how it can make your projects the best, then let's understand what color grading is, along with other important information that would be helpful for you.

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Why Is Color Grading Important?

People usually wonder, what is the need for color grading? Why can't the camera look perfect when you shoot it? There are two reasons why color grading is too important. The first reason is technical. We all want a camera that exposes the broadest range of information possible to make it look good; you will require to give up some of that information to focus the eye where you want your camera to look.

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You have to wait as long as possible to throw that information away so that the camera focuses on exposing the widest latitude possible. Another reason behind this is art. Only some people agree on what looks good, as it is different for some projects.

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For instance, your thriller film may want less color, and a more fantastic look, whereas your romantic comedy might want more saturation and a warmer color look. However, your camera doesn't know what type of film you are shooting as there is no genre setting in the menu with options for rom-com and horror. So it would help if you colored grade to craft the image appropriately for the story you want in each case.

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History of Color Grading

According to some traces, the history of color grading is around the 1980s with video color grading tools as the truth filmmakers have been adding and affecting the color and brightness of their projects from the origin of cinema. Even when the films came in black and white projects, you could affect the brightness and contrast through the time spent in the bath, and thus every studio used to have its lab and custom processes to create signature looks in their projects.

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You can buy film stock in several 'tints', and that's how many films are released with complete tinted reels. You could even get each film frame hand colored for some projects, but that was a highly labour-intensive process. Later the lab became more involved with the coming of color film processes. And eventually, it was followed by the creation of the Hazeltine, a machine for lab film timing.

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Hazeltine worked on an RGB process and had three sliders: one controlled the Red/Cyan axis, one controlled Green/Magnets, and the Blue/Yellow. One change in the machine affected the complete image all at once; thus, you had to find a balance. For instance, you could not just lower the Red as you lowered the Red by adding Cyan. It was a limited tool set, but the experienced filmmakers learned to add lightning and filters on set with the tools of the machine to create more dynamic imagery.

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 In the 80s and 90s, video image and correction tools innovated rapidly and were primarily known for their ability to control particular areas of the frame. Filmmakers in music videos and commercials got excited about this power as they could now control and manipulate the image and were able to bring those tools back to their feature film projects.

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In the early 2000s, digital color grading became a part of the motion picture world, and we began to see the complete image manipulation tools available to anyone who wants to tell a story with moving images. One of the most accessible and user-friendly image manipulation tools is erase.bg, which lets you precisely edit an image's background. You can also edit different backgrounds to your image, adding an attractive flair for the audience.

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Difference between Color Grading, Color Timing, and Color Correction

Have you heard terms like timing and correction along with grading? You may have seen different posts describing each of these terms. In general, these terms are used interchangeably. You can define them separately, but DPs, directors, producers, and post houses use these terms as similar, so you should treat them the same way.

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We avoid the term color correction as some may think it is a mistake that was made and needs to be corrected. However, the colour grading abbreviation is CC, not CG, as CG implies computer graphics. So even when you see projects and everyone uses color grading, you will still see files like 'My Movie CC', which refer to the project undergone through color grading.

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Besides this, color timing is an older term from the days when the films were used to develop in a bath of chemicals. You can even use a stopwatch to see the time and how long a film was in a bath, as it affects how the image looks, which is why the term timing is used. This term is film specific, but you will still hear many filmmakers referring to the digital color grading process as timing because it is simply an accepted use of the phrase.

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Moreover, it would be pedantic to limit timing to film projects as there are many other terms we use from older technology, but they are still in use. For instance, the term striking when turning on a light initially refers to the strike of an arc lamp and does not apply to an LED, but we still use it with that. This implies that language is fluid and can carry over from one technology to the next. Similarly, color grading, timing, and correction are the same.

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In Which Software Should You Color grade?

Now that you know what color grading is, can you color grade in Premiere or Final Cut Pro? It is essential to know what software you should color grade in. However, you have already edited your project on these platforms. In that case, you must have faced a tight schedule, as this software has only essential color grading tools that can be very useful.

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For example, the Lumetri color panel in Adobe Premiere has most of the essential tools to help manipulate your image. At the same time, Final Cut Pro has not only a traditional three-color tool set but also an innovative color board that is designed to help you manipulate your image in a fast and efficient way. But if you still need to do it and have time to move your project over, then the best software for color grading your project is Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve.

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About Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve

Resolve is free software that you can use to final color grade your project. It was launched initially as a dedicated color grading program and continues at the lead of color grading toolsets. You can use this software on projects up to the studio motion picture level. Moreover, when it comes to executing a color grade, it has all the tools to execute the proper grade and make things more organized by making color grading more accessible and more efficient.

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This software is known for its incredible speed and creativity. It has a wide range of tools, such as grouping shots, automating tracking, building a robust array of reference stills, and a host of plugins.

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Other colour grading tools are worth considering, like Assimilate Scratch and Baselight, but you have to pay for them. It is worth spending money on these tools in the future when their features offer you something that Resolve does not have. But if you are starting, then Resolve has everything you need to learn and execute excellent color grades, and everything is free.

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It also has tools to edit your projects directly rather than handing over the steps to other software. Overall you can use Resolve for some projects to do a color, then keep editing, then color grade edit, as it gives you a more fluid and iterative workflow.

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In addition, Resolve is also contentious in its training and certification process. So if you are interested in learning how to use it, they offer you a dedicated training page with free ebooks and different videos. There is also a robust infrastructure for YouTube training. However, YouTube tutorials usually focus on specific techniques and do not provide a basic introductory framework.

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So if you want to learn from basics, then the tutorials from Blackmagic come handily, and you can learn everything from their tutorial page. After that, when you are ready for the specific techniques, you can go to YouTube videos to learn the popular color grading techniques.

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Impact of Raw and Log

You may know that cameras that shoot in formats are known as raw video or log video. How are those going to affect your color grading workflow? Both of these formats open up a wider latitude of brightness values to be recorded on set to provide more flexibility in post-production. Raw does this by recording the raw image data, which are censored and unprocessed.

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Most cameras usually take that data, process it through the camera setting, and write it into a linear video file that leaves out a lot of picture information. This makes the work easy as the linear video files are easy to work with but also put valuable picture information in the trash.

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Recording and color grading in raw open up an entire world of flexibility in which much picture information is available. The tradeoff is that raw files are usually slower to process, so you need a powerful machine to work with them. You will also benefit from making an alternative file for editing purposes.

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On the other hand, Log attains a similar trick differently. In general, a linear video has a specific latitude. Around seven brightness stops, information can usually be stored in a traditional 10-bit HD video file. So if your camera shoots to the traditional linear video file formats, you can get the most latitude.

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The Log allows you to record broader latitude brightness data up to 13 to 14 stops into a linear file by flattening the brightness. As it is a log image in a linear file container, it will look very flat when you see it, but if you work with a proper editing system, you will get access to the full range of data, providing you more room to color grade.

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Color Management

One new thing that you should understand about workflow is color management. With the growth of ACES and the development of color-managed workflows from Blackmagic, color management is becoming very popular in the industry. But do you know what color management is? In simple terms, a color-managed workflow is where you can tell the system what camera and settings were used to shoot the beginning footage, and thus the system deals with each shot differently.

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Suppose you have shot half your project on a Canon R5 in C-log and another half on a Sony FX6 in S-log3, so while doing traditional workflow, you would apply LUTs to both sets of footage, or you would match each of them by hand. As both cameras have their working style, this can be challenging. But with a color-managed workflow, you can highlight all the footage from a camera, right-click on it, identify the format, and the software will manage it into a common color space.

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You will still see the differences in how the images look, as color management could be better. However, the footage should behave in a much more similar fashion as it will make the matchmaking between cameras easier. In addition, color management also helps in the exports as you can color manage the separate exports you are creating for a theatrical release, streaming release, or even in old-school formats such as BluRay.

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What should be done with dark footage and noise correction? 

One of the most common questions people ask regarding color grading is what should be done with dark footage that was underexposed when it was shot. Sometimes the scenario itself was too dark, like a night exterior or sometimes, the settings on the camera were wrong. In each case, the footage becomes too dark, which makes it difficult to see important details. But can color grading fix it?

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You can do a lot with the dark footage depending on how badly it was underexposed. While you may think of simply brightening the whole frame, it is often wiser to lift the brightest areas of the frame and middle parts of your shot in exposure up and leave your shadows in place in underexposed footage. It can bring useful picture information out of darkness and still look pleasing.

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One of the primary drawbacks of most dark footage is digital video noise. The digital video raises a lot of noise at the lower end of the exposure spectrum. For instance, those dancing dots and flecks that cover footage. In many cases, gentle noise can be pleasing, but heavy noise distracts an audience. Moreover, when you brighten dark footage, you will often get a lot of digital video noise.

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So the solution for this noise correction is DaVinci Resolve, as it has an inbuilt noise corrector. You can upgrade to the studio version at $299 in Resolve. However, you can also purchase third-party noise correction tools from Neat Video, Magic Bullet, and others. If you have a project where you have shot darker footage than you hoped, then there are chances that you have to work with noise correction and fixing it will become a part of the process.

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The Final Words

Color grading is an essential step in the process of achieving everything that you want your footage to look like. Even if you want to do it with someone else, learning the basics of color grading will make you a more informed client when you want to hire a colorist to color grade your footage.

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Therefore, gaining basic knowledge of color grading can help you to do a quick and efficient color grade on small projects where you do not necessarily need a colorist. However, mastering color grading can take years, but we hope it is an excellent start to understanding what it is all about.