Everything You Need To Know About Colour Grading

Colour grading, often an understated part of content creation, involves changing the tone and emotions of an image to achieve a cinematic or dramatic effect. This may involve adjusting dark, light, and shadows as well as changing the hue, luminance and saturation of images.

Colour grading revolves around your everyday tasks, including taking a black and white photograph, altering curves or levels in Photoshop, and changing the face colour of an image. When color grading, content creators utilize software and a picture background remover that stylizes a picture to emphasize the visual tone and atmosphere and make it more cinematic.

Color grading, which typically comes after color correction, makes footage appear realistic while evoking the intended ambiance. This article focuses on the dramatic effects of colour grading in film and photography, the need for colour grading, and the best tools to use when colour grading.

Colour Grading In Photography

Once you have edited an image to a realistic and natural form through color correction, you may want to enhance the ante by adding more tone, mood, feeling, and drama. Colour grading influences photography by a long shot. You can tell that images have been colour graded when they have the same colour palette or similar look and feel.

The use of filters in most social media platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat is a form of colour grading. Such pictures typically feature a tonal grading that captures a specific emotion representing what the photographer wants.

Colour grading allows you to develop your consistency of style, from adding some blue to the shadows on a photograph to achieve a more urban look or stressing greener hues to make a salad look more enticing.

Instead of chromatic bursts, you can take color grading in photography to the next level by shooting in black and white. In the digital age of colour, capturing shots in black and white is not only reminiscing but also aesthetic. Black and white photography embodies elements such as composition and texture, thus making it a form of colour grading.

Colour Grading In Cinema

Cinematic colour grading is a creative option that aims to use colour to best explain the story being told. Colour grading artists understand the essence of accommodating colour grading structures and recommend using file formats that can store a wide array of colour data. A typical file format to use is the EXRs format.

Several colour grading workflows, such as the Academy Color Encoding System (ACES), are being developed to preserve colour accuracy across different input formats. Hopefully, such development will reduce the need for color correction while emphasizing colour grading.

Since colour grading is more of an emotional polish, directors and filmmakers prefer to wait until the end of the production phase before implementing it. Colour grading in cinema can arouse controversy since TV typically uses formats such as HDR. When incorrectly implemented, a rather beautifully graded video can be rendered muddy and blocky when viewed on a regular TV.

Colour Grading Terms Explained

Colour grading can be separated into two distinct parts. First, the aspects that formulate the atmosphere, including highlights, contrast, blacks, whites, and shadows. These aspects are responsible for the dramatic effect. The other segment consists of aspects that adjust a color style, including hue, temperature, saturation, and luminance. These aspects affect the emotion in an image.

Let us dive deeper into each aspect and how you can use them.

Achieving a Dramatic Effect

Have you ever glanced at a moodier photo and seen the feelings displayed by muted color tones? You can achieve this by clever use of blackened elements and image shadowing in color grading.

Contrast

This tool allows you to adjust the clarity and shadows in an image. Increasing the contrast brings up more dark elements of a photo. On the other hand, lowering it will result in fewer details and shadows, delivering a more muted sheen.

Shadows and highlights

In colour grading editing, shadow and highlight tools allow you to lower the shadow and light source elements present in your image and add darkness or brightness to tune the aspects.

Blacks and whites

A typical photo features pure black and pure white shades that are adjustable. You can make snow look glistening or clouds pop by increasing the white shade. Similarly, you can create a bold, moody night sky or intense shadow if you increase the black.

Adjusting Emotion

Do you wish to mute certain colors in your photo or change their tone? With hue, luminance, and saturation, you can easily experiment with the base colors in your photo. By adjusting colours, you can achieve any emotion you want.

Hue

This refers to the pure pigment of colours present in the primary and secondary color wheel. Colour grading allows you to fine-tune each color to achieve your desired shade. For instance, adjusting the blue hue will result in almost green colour or near-purple color on different ends of the scale.

Saturation

With this tool, you can change the intensity of colors or focus on a specific color to saturate. The more pops of color present, the happier the feelings induced.

Luminance

Luminance can be defined as adding brightness and shimmer to a particular element of an image.

Temperature

Temperate is a mood changer from a bolder scale such as blue to cooler color temperatures such as yellow to add warmth.

You can color grade some parts of the image for other cinematic styles and replace or cut out background. This can be done through a bg remover online.

Best Tools for color grading

Here is my pick of the best photo editing platforms for colour grading.

• Davinci Resolve- No other software beats Davinci Resolve by Blackmagic designs. Especially for beginners. It features VFX, among other editing features that can be accessed for free.
• Google’s Snapseed- This excellent colour grading tool is suitable for photographers and is available for iOS and Android OS.
• Lightroom- This tool is perfect for beginners who wish to understand color grading and its elements. Just import your image and start editing right away.
• Photoshop- This is a professional tool for expert color grading. However, you can still use it for basic cinematic edits.

Conclusion- what is the Importance of Color Grading

Colour grading enables you to capture mood, time, and character in an image. Achieving the right colour look for a scene is an essential part of the production. This helps to capture the atmosphere or emotions encountered when taking the photo, thus maximizing the effect of the feeling, thus ensuring ensures that the color helps to tell the story.