Colour Grading

Colour Grading is the technique in editing by changing the colour of your shot to either alter or give effect to the scene.

Now this can be done in a number of different ways, for example boosting or lowering your contrast or hue depending on the conditions of your shots, changing the colour temperature to give the image more warmth and depth. The are many softwares that you can use to colour grade. Final cut has a basic form of 3 way colour correction. Along in the final cut package is the software Colour, where you can import your timeline from final cut and grade it from there, but the software i personally like to use is Magic Bullet looks. Now the reason i use this over final cut or Colour is it has more variety and more tools for grading.

In our colour grading tutorial, i used magic bullet looks to grade my scene 34 edit. The colour in the original footage was way off between the shot of Catherine and the male escort.

Now in the original edit the sea in the background was very white. I lowered down the hue and increased the gain to a more blue look to make the sea look more real than out of place.






The male's face in the original shot was very orange. Now this can be caused to the wrong setting of the white balance when filming. To adjust it to a more flesh looking colour i altered the curves on both the highlights and the hue until the image looked more real in colour. When i was finished with this shot, i then went through matching up the colour for Catherine's shots.



I then went through wide shots of the location making sure that the colour of the sea matched the dialogue shots.

I think of an edit in three parts in order for it to be successful and work for the viewing public. The first part is the visual image and the composition of the scene,  you look at a film like Drive and this achieved highly with composition compared to a film compared to a film like Batman And Robin. Second is sound, the audience wont mind if your image is bad if your sound is good, if your sound is bad however, you will loose connection with your audience. Thirdly is Colour grading. The audience will able to tell if your shots don't look the same in colour and will be taken away by it.