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Color Correction

Photo credit: Paquita Parks

Bright blue skies, rich green leaves, golden sunsets—color is one of the most basic components of our visual sense, and the enhancement and manipulation of color is perhaps the most basic way to refine and improve the visuals in your film. Some filmmakers prefer a saturated, rich color palette, while others prefer muted, subtle hues. You decided on a color palette for your film when you began the process of art direction in preproduction and continued developing it as you decided on a lighting style and other visual elements during your shoot. Now you can continue that process by color correcting your

footage in post.

Perhaps you are happy with your color choices that you made during the shoot and now you only want to enhance what you already have. More likely, perhaps, is that you are happy with some of your scenes but others have technical issues: cameras that don’t match, bad white balance, exposure problems, lighting that doesn’t match between your principle shoot and your day of pickups. All of these problems can be minimized or fixed entirely with color correction.

It might not always be bad news that sends you to the color controls of your editing application. Often, you’ll want to perform color adjustments for more artistic reasons. Perhaps you want to amp up the reds or blues in an image to strike a certain emotional tone. Or maybe you simply like certain colors more than others. Whatever the reason, color-correction tools will be some of the most-used effects in your editing program.

Traditionally, movies shot on film go through a process called color grading when they are finished. Today with digital filmmaking technology, the term color grading is used to refer to the process of doing a final polish pass on your film to make the colors match across the length of the film and to fix any problems along the way. Color grading is a potentially complex process and hiring an expert colorist is usually recommended. But if that’s beyond the budget or scale of your project, that doesn’t mean you should skip this step in the finishing process altogether.

All the professional editing applications that we’ve mentioned so far provide sophisticated tools for correcting and changing the color in your video. In addition, there are software applications that are oriented especially toward image enhancement, such as Adobe After Effects, Apple Color, and special plug-in packages like Red Giant’s Magic Bullet Suite.

Whether you use these tools for artistic reasons or for more practical concerns, an understanding of the color correction features of your software is invaluable. In this chapter, we’ll show you how to use the basic tool set for correcting the color in your footage without putting your image quality at risk.

When to Color Correct

Typically, an overall color correction or color-grading pass is done at the end of the editing process, after the picture is “locked.” However, you may want to spot-fix any distracting problems earlier.