Colour grading research

Colour grading is something that is used in almost every piece of professional digital video and film work. Colour grading can take the form of simple colour correction such as correcting the overall tone, or can be used to give a particular look, for instance making a scene look warm or cold.

Wikipedia defines colour grading as

“Color grading is the process of altering and enhancing the color of a motion picture or television image, either electronically, photo-chemically or digitally”. 

These days almost all colour grading is done digitally using various programs on different computers. Colour grading can consist of one or all of the following: changing brightness; changing contrast; adjusting white point; adding or removing red, green and blue; or applying filters.
Colour grading in it’s most basic form is usually used to either correct shots, like matching one shot with the next one, but can also be used to give a piece a look, or, for example, to make the sky more blue or someones skin look more flesh coloured.
Most video editing software contains some form of tool that’ll help the user to program colour correction and grading.These are some of the most common ones:

Final Cut Pro 

Final cut pro contains some good colour correction tools; not the most extensive or the best sometimes, but it’ll certainly do the job alot of the time! 

Color 

If your serious about colour correction and intend to do alot of it, Color is part of Final Cut Studio and is very good at colour grading providing lots of tools for correcting problems or giving a scene a look. It can also send sequences between its Final Cut Studio brother ‘Final Cut Pro’.

After Effects

After Effects is another program that has some great inbuilt colour grading tools, there are also a number of plug-ins available to extend it’s capabilities such as Red Giant’s Colourista II, this plug-in is also available for Final Cut too.

Premiere Pro

Premiere pro has a similar toolset for colour grading to Final Cut, not the best but certainly more than capable for most jobs.

Avid 

Avid is another video editing programme that can be used to colour grade, with a very robust set of tools. 

In terms of my film, I intend to use Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Studio’s Color to really add a certain feel to my film. The good thing about both of these products being Final Cut is that they are integrated with each other, so a sequence I create in Final Cut can be export to Color in a few clicks. If I need to learn more about how to actually colour grade, then I will look on the Vimeo Video School to look at some tutorials, but for now I know what to do.