But what’s the difference between these two terms, and how do you use them effectively in your editing process? In this article, we’ll break down the basics of color correction and color grading, and provide you with some helpful techniques to get you started.
Color Correction vs. Color Grading: What’s the Difference?
In short, color correction is a technical process that adjusts your video’s color and exposure to achieve accuracy and consistency. This includes adjustments like exposure, white balance, and contrast, and is necessary for ensuring that the objects, colors, and skin tones in your scene look real, as well as maintaining a cohesive visual style throughout your entire video.
On the other hand, color grading is a more creative process that enhances the style of your video. Grading techniques can help you set a specific tone, create a certain mood, emphasize emotion, or even achieve a cinematic aesthetic. While color correction provides an objective standard for accuracy, color grading offers a subjective way to add style and flair to your video.
Essential Techniques for Color Correction and Grading
Before you start color grading, you’ll want to make sure that your footage is shot and edited in a way that will lend itself to grading. Here are a few essential techniques to keep in mind:
Always shoot in a well-lit and well-exposed environment. This will provide you with high-quality footage that you can easily grade to enhance and stylize. Group your clips on the timeline by scene or lighting setups to easily apply the same color adjustments to all of your clips. A calibrated monitor or screen is necessary for grading. This will help you avoid applying color adjustments that may look fine on your screen but bad on others. If you have access to scopes such as waveform and vectorscope, they can also help you achieve the perfect color balance.
Now let’s go over some basic color correction techniques. Most editing software provides you with a color correction menu where you can make the following adjustments: Exposure and contrast. Use these sliders to make your scene brighter or darker by bringing the highlights and shadows up and down. White balance. Use this slider to make whites in your scene appear truly white, rather than a shade of blue or orange. Saturation. Use this slider to make your colors more saturated and rich. You can also use saturation to desaturate your colors. So tweaking the shadows and highlights will make your subject stand out and will also make your video look more 3D. You can also color grade to create a specific look or feel. This could be a filmic teal and orange, a monochrome color scheme, or a desaturated look. All of these will allow you to create a unique look for your videos.
What Are LUTs and How Do You Use Them? LUTs or Look Up Tables are essentially pre-built color grading profiles that you can import into your NLE to apply a specific look or color grade to your video. This is very useful if you have a lot of clips that you want to have the same look and feel. Don’t just apply a LUT and hope for the best though. You may still need to make adjustments to get the look you want depending on the lighting conditions, the exposure of your clip, and other factors. LUTs are best used as a starting point and then you can tweak from there. How to Match Colors Between Clips In order to achieve a professional finish, you need to make sure all of your clips match in terms of the color. If you have clips with wildly different colors it can be very jarring for the viewer. You can use the vectorscope to match the colors between clips. You can also do this visually but using scopes will help you achieve an exact match.
Things you want to match are skin tones, the colors in the background, and the lighting. You want to pay particular attention to the color when cutting between scenes. If you have two clips with radically different colors it can be quite jarring for the viewer. Getting the brightness, the contrast, and the hue to match will make the editing process much smoother for the viewer. How to Enhance Your Shadows and Highlights Using the shadows and highlights is a great way to draw attention to your subject. You can also use them to bring attention to other things in your scene that you want the viewer to notice. You can also enhance the shadows to add some depth to your image.
You don’t want to overdo it though. If you brighten your image too much it will blow out your highlights and you will lose detail. If you darken your shadows too much the same thing will happen. You want to enhance the image to help tell your story. How to Achieve a Natural Color Grading Look Sometimes you don’t want a stylized look. If you are editing an interview or a tutorial you will probably want as natural a look as possible. If you push the colors too much in a video like this it will be distracting for the viewer and they will not engage with your video as much.
You want to make sure your image is still nice and bright and vibrant but it needs to be natural. You need to balance the contrast, the saturation, and the brightness to achieve a natural look. You also want to make sure the skin tones are right and the color of objects in your scene are accurate. How to Check Your Color Grading On Different Monitors Finally, you want to check your color grade on as many different monitors as you can. The colors may look different on a laptop screen to a monitor and they may look different again on a mobile device. If people are going to be watching your video on a range of different devices you want to check the grading on as many of them as you can and tweak it until you get a result you like. Conclusion Color correction and color grading take time and practice to master but they are a crucial step in the editing process.
Not only do they make your video look better, but they also help you tell your story. As you get more comfortable with the process you will start to develop your own style and this will become one of your signature techniques as an editor.