Colour Correction and Colour Grading are two very similar terms thrown around the video production and film production industry. But what exactly are the differences between the two, and how do they compare? Our Digital Video Production team prides itself on having high quality and the creative video production skills to create or design various types of video styles, suitable for personal, brand, company or corporate use. All within your budget.

Understanding Colour In Editing

To start, it’s worth noting that both of these colour editing processes happen in the post-production section. The purpose of both of them is to make the original footage look more realistic and natural whilst giving a style to the footage.

So what does colour correction and colour grading do?

What Is Colour Correction?

Colour correcting is the base of all colouring stages with its main purpose to adjust the colour, contrast, and exposure of the original footage. This way the footage looks less processed and more natural whilst also portraying the emotion the director is intending for.

Furthermore, like in the name, this stage also has stages involved to fix certain colours and change them to what they’re intended to be by the director. Sometimes a scene can go the best it can possibly be, but is unfortunately sabotaged by a mistake within the lighting, making it appear inconsistent with the rest of the footage.

Colour correction is also here to optimise any visual effects added to the scene to further mask any small errors allowing it to appear more realistic and consistent.

What Is Colour Grading?

Unlike colour correction, colour grading is specifically specified within the stylisation process of the footage. In other words, colour grading comes after colour correction – think of your current colour correction as your canvas and the colour grading as your brush. You are essentially painting on top of what you have already established.

Colour grading may range from stylising to footage to adjusting the tone and mood of the actual scene, making it more atmospheric and cinematic. The colour grading process is used to make technical and creative changes to the footage with colour correction applied. Colourists use colour grading the carefully match a certain colour palette provided by the director to apply the correct atmospheric tone, mood and emotion.

How Do You Colour Grade a Video?

Once these two are now distinguishable, you are ready to start your own colour adjustments. It’s worth noting that this is a very time consuming task, hence why most films acting on a budget would actually hire a service to do this for them, rather than hire people as this is a cheaper alternative. If you wish to have cheap and popping visuals, then our Video Production team can reliably make this happen for you.

Colouring a video requires a lot of patience and attention to detail. Furthermore, information from the director is needed in what parts are emotionally driven, or certain ideas that they believe are of importance.

Shoot In An Colour Adjustable Format

Footage that is shot on a format that appears flat with little contrast, saturation and tone (like s-lock) are the easiest to work with as this gives the most freedom of adjustment to the colourist. All cameras have predefined profiles that you can choose from, but with research, you can find what’s the most suitable for your set.

Adjust The White Balance

Before diving into the deep end, you need to set up your footage by adjusting the luma values (white balance). If you do this after editing the colour, you will notice that the colour becomes more saturated or desaturated. This is because the white balance brings out the detail in the scene, so the colouring should be adjusted accordingly after the luma.

There are many technical steps to making sure your luma values are correct, such as using lumetri scopes to fit the white balancing between the values 1 and 100 (most displays are sRGB, and can only display light up to 100. This would be different if displayed on a cinema screen).

Fixing The Tone

Balancing of the tones is necessary to bring the quality of the footage to light. Balancing the tone by adjusting the shadows, highlights, midtones and contrast all make a huge impact on enhancing the video to its max potential. Remember, the lighting of your image needs to be correct first.

Using Chroma Scopes

Now that your lighting is set up, the next stage of importance is getting the skin tone correct. Up until this point, worrying about the colour of the scene shouldn’t have been on your mind. By using chroma scopes (colour scopes), you can find the skin tone line – you want to match the skin tone of your current footage onto this line. No matter what racial identity you have, this line will match it, this is because skin has a subtle flesh-like colour.

Colour Correction

Now that you’re fully set up, you can start adjusting the colour of the shadows, highlights, and general scene. Using the information provided by the director of the sequence, you can use this knowledge to portray the shot as best as you want. It’s worth noting that some shots that are similar can have the colour correction copy and pasted, however, this will require slight adjustment because the lighting will change.

Colour Grading

Now that you have colour corrected your sequence, it should be clear that the footage is more alive than what it once was, however, we aren’t exactly done yet. The last part is making adjustments on top of your colour correction to adjust the mood, tone and emotion of the general scene. Again, you will need information from the director to understand what the original intent is. This may range from adjusting the temperature to tint depending if the film is sad or upbeat, or medieval of fantasy like.