Thanks Jason Johns, Media Services’ man-of-awesome!Īlong the same lines, almost all night vision shots are created with color grading, such as in this shot form Zero Dark Thirty. Production Tip: White balance off a manila envelope for easy in-camera day-for-night. This is common practice since shooting in low light can be difficult and frequently imparts heavy grain in the image. The warm, desaturated, blown-out highlights are used to stylize the ultra-bright daytime of multiple suns with dark, cold blues for the long, dangerous nights.įaux nighttime can also be created in color grading when the footage was shot during the day. Pitch Black uses color theme changes to show time lapse akin to Traffic’s use for locale. The Matrix movies are another iconic example of color being used to indicate changes in locale with heavy greens for the Matrix and more true to life colors for the real world. Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic used starkly contrasting color themes for Mexico’s corrupt underbelly and the United State’s political environment. Desaturation can also be used when dealing with a bleak and dreary world like the one in AMC’s The Walking Dead.Ĭontrasting color grades can be used to differentiate locations, opposing forces or viewpoints, and acts within a picture. O Brother Where Art Thou employed a variant using desaturation while exaggerating the yellows and orange hues in a monochromatic color palette. Sepia tone is also used for the same purpose, but more sparingly. A desaturated look is used to indicate something from a long time ago, such as in HBO’s Band of Brothers. There any many common grades that you may not have overtly noticed. Grading can be used subtly, to warm a scene by pushing the oranges and reds to give it the feel of late afternoon, or be used to make sweeping changes, creating striking visuals creating a surreal dream sequence. Usually at the end of editing the editor will begin color grading, give the project to a dedicated colorist, or when quicker turnaround is required the footage will be sent off to be graded while editing is being done.Ĭolor is a powerful component and careful thought goes into crafting the look of a piece. Rarely color grading can even be used to salvage problematic footage that color correction is incapable of fixing. Typically the alterations in color grading are more extreme than with color correction.

Even passing clouds will change the color.Ĭolor grading (color timing in reference to film) is altering the image for aesthetic or communicative purposes to enhance the story, create a visual tone, convey a mood, express emotion, or carry a theme.

In addition, if you are shooting outside over the course of an entire day the color of the light will change as we move from sunrise to mid-day to dusk. If done improperly your image will have a red, blue, or yellow cast. However, with cameras you have to tell the sensor what white is. The human eye will view white under varying lighting as white. Typically this is compensating for inaccurate camera settings, leveling color temperature, or adjusting contrast, brightness, and saturation. While color correction and color grading use some of the same tools and processes they serve different purposes and are done in different parts of the workflow.Ĭolor correction is used to alter footage across a project so that its appearance is consistent, creating an accurate portrayal as it would be viewed by the human eye, making sure whites look white and blacks look black. As part of being a novice in post-production terminology frequently gets misused or interchanged. Working with color is an important aspect of video production that many people grow into, at least cursorily.

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