In my previous post, I talked about how balancing video footage is often the starting point for working with video footage. Beyond the color correction and color balancing of individual shots, becomes the process of color grading multiple shots, edited together to create a scene and then the final project.
Often color grading, as a term, is defined as the more creative process, where decisions go beyond just color ‘balancing’.
In the last ten years, the use of Look Up Tables (aka LUTs and Cubes) have become extremely popular for anyone editing video footage. In some respects, these simple ‘filters’ (like the ones you get in Instagram) are a form of automatic color grading, as they apply an interesting ‘look’ that can enhance the original video footage from the ordinary to extraordinary, but just as equally, when overused, can actually detract from the emotional impact of the project on the viewer.
Defining what ‘look’ is appropriate for any given project is often a decision based on the script, genre, time of day and ultimately the mood the director, and the cinematographer, is trying to curate to the viewer.
While tools such as LUTs and to some extent, automatic color balancing tools like ColorGradr, have greatly helped this process, the skill for most Colorists is balancing between shots, sometimes dynamically changing color grade settings during shots and angles in any chosen software, either to fix exposure issues, or to create a creative effect and then apply a look to that shot, and so the scene, that further enhances the emotion felt by the viewer along with various ‘windows’ that can be used to adjust the exposure in certain sections of the shot, highlighting or reducing the impact of other aspects of the composition.
Thus ColorGradr has its own LUTs (looks/cubes) built-in, that I have designed, to give fast results, either creatively, or for fixing skintones that are coming up too magenta, for example. Some of them are based on major TV series you may have seen in the last few years! But ColorGradr also allows the user to load their own LUTs, so that the user can very quickly get a decent result, and then blend the amount of effect that look has on each shot. You can even add multiple ColorGradr effects to clips in most editing systems so you can add multiple looks, and blend between them while using the powerful automatic color balancing tools of ColorGradr.
We have also launched a new feature that will help match shots in a sequence, once they are automatically balanced by ColorGradr. We expect this to further speed up the whole process, and to get editors solving challenging material quickly, and then into the fun of creative color grading, rather than ‘fixing’ and balancing!