There seems to be an interest, as well as a bit of confusion, as to how color grading is done for cinema (which includes video).  I’ve read through the various threads here and, while there is some great information, on a basic level, there is a lack of understanding as to how the process works on larger budget film.  This is exacerbated by the plug-in manufactures who provide color tools that do not provide the kind of power necessary to really do the work - Magic Bullet and Colorista) come to mind, as they were referenced here before.   There may be new plug-ins that do what I’m going to describe, but as I don’t use them, I don’t really keep up on it – I’m only going by what I saw posted here.

Don’t get me wrong, they have some nice presets and can do some  basic stuff, however I’m pretty sure that once the actual process is explained, there are those here who could do a better job with PS for small jobs and, for those really interested in getting into it, would find that using Da Vinci’s resolve (or Apple Color, which has apparently been discontinued) to be the better alternative for longer works.

The reason the plug-ins offered so far don’t work very well is that they only offer global changes, and that is only part of the process.  To understand the process we first need to understand the difference between color correction and color grading.  Color correction refers to normalizing footage for color balance and setup. 

When shooting digitally, color balance isn’t such a big issue because we can do a custom white balance prior for each scene, but that wasn’t always the case.  With film, for example, you only had daylight balanced film and tungsten balanced film.  Even if shooting daylight balanced film in daylight, the actual color temps could fluctuate quite a bit depending on the intensity of the light (just as with still photography).  Shooting tungsten didn’t have as much variation, but it did exist – even different batches of film could have slight differences in color temp.   Because of this, we need to correct all the footage so that we have a consistent white point from which to begin grading.  Also we want to normalize our levels.  We refer to levels as lift/gamma/gain – lift is our black point, gamma our mid point and gain our white point.  Again, we’re not trying to be creative here, just trying to correct the footage for consistency.  These changes are global in nature.

Color grading is where we make creative changes to create a “look” for the film or a particular scene within it.  These changes are localized.  Because of this we use several different “rooms” to accomplish this (today these “rooms” are just tabs in a program, but there was a time when they were actual, physical rooms and we still use the term today).

So let’s say you want to do that Teal in the shadows, cream-pink in the highlights look.  What I keep seeing being discussed is to simply pull your shadows towards teal and your highlights toward pink until you create a balance.  These, however, are global changes and not how we would really go about doing this.

Instead, we would separate those actions into two of our secondary rooms.  The first would use a HSL (hue, saturation, luminance) mask to isolate the shadow tones and we would grade those tones toward teal, without affecting the rest of the image.  Then we would open another room and select the highlight tones we wanted to effect and adjust those toward pink.  Next we would open up a third room to handle our midtones or maybe only our skin tones, or both, or a room for each.  You get the idea.

After that is all done, we may open up more rooms to make changes to certain specific elements, such as a sky, or an open doorway, or a person in shadow. We might use ten or more of these secondary rooms to get the look we want.  Better systems have the ability to work with nodes, which allows for very complex selections and actions.

After all of our secondary work is done, we go to our Primary Out and make necessary tweaks to the overall look.  As with the Primary In, these changes are global and corrective.

Plug-ins that only allow for global changes are fine for insta-looks, but they lack the power necessary to really dig into an image color-wise.

You should put this in the .edu

Interesting to know that the process I've adopted isn't too far off. I almost always start off by color correcting the image by setting the white and black points and getting rid of any unnatural colors and then tone the image to affect mood.

In the next couple months or so, I'd like to start exploring video so threads like this are helpful. I'll have to keep that davinci program in mind when I do.

Paramour I would like to say thank you for putting this up here. I only have one thing to add. Photoshop and Capture one pros color editors allow you to sink color into shadows , mids or highlights independently....... its not a global over all coloration.

There happen to be many ways within the program to do it. You can chose a specific color channel and go right into a specific area of the darks and tweek it. Its been that way for some time now.. Curves specifically lets you plot targets. Plusyou have the mask to get even more picky.

Get some

B

Paramour Productions， thanks for your detailed write-up. However, what most forgot to incorporate into their work is the understanding of cultural meanings of color. Just 2cents.

very interesting thread, keep it coming! Even though its intended for video it helps allot to visualize things in a different way so I can incorporate this to my retouch...

OOC, from your perspective is there any reason that digital film production hasn't adopted a workflow more like the still realm for color correction (ColorCheckers, etc.)?

It seems that it would give a more accurate scene-to-scene correction from which to work with less manual effort.  And if you can photograph radiosity balls over and over again for a scene....

re - room corrections
I was under impression that at least some of the workflows create one room for most of the movie, and then others to make slight corrections for different scenes.
(not necessary separating each selective correction to a separate room)