Colour correction can do a great deal in setting your film apart from amateurs.
When done right, it doesn’t just make your film look professional, it also brings out more emotions to the scenes to give people the best level of satisfaction and experience.
It positions you to be a bonafide filmmaker albeit independent.
However, colour correction is sometimes used interchangeably with colour grading. So to start this post, we’ll unveil the stark differences between the two. Then we’ll move forward to explaining why you should give color correction significant weight post-production.
After covering those two points, we’ll begin discussing 9 examples of how the colour correction is done.
By the end of this post, you’ll know the basic tricks of the trade to get a professional-looking film even when you’re just starting and start making money in the film industry.
Let’s jump right in.
The Difference Between Colour Correction And Colour Grading
First off, colour corrections should ideally come first before colour grading.
Why?
Doing colour correction before colour grading will take a lot of weight off when doing the latter. You’ll have to do fewer steps and it gets less complicated.
So what’s the difference between the two?
Colour correction involves altering each clip of the film’s footage to achieve a standard appearance. This includes correcting the issues with the underlying image by making the black look black, the whites look white and balancing out the colours to make sure it’s even.
By correcting the colour, you will be able to match the film footage to an actual portrayal. Simply said, it makes the footage look more natural, like how you would see it in real life.
An example of this will be if you’re shooting outdoors where the sun’s quality is going to fluctuate. Because of this, the film clips’ colours won’t match each other.
Hence, you need colour correction to make the video look consistent even when outside factors can’t be fully controlled.
When doing colour correction, you adjust ISO noise, enhance tones, exposure, white balance, and contrast to make clips look consistent with each other.
Essentially, you’re digitally modifying the raw footage to replicate how it would look when a human eye perceives it.
To cap off, the goal of colour correction is to get a uniform look for all of the film clips to make it more natural to the human eye.
Once done, colour grading should follow. So what is it really?
Unlike colour correction, which, well… corrects the clip colours, colour grading is about enhancing colours to achieve a certain mood for the film. It adds more detail to the story.
Take this photo from thepodcasthost’s Guide to Podcast software. It has a colour-graded image of Colin Gray setting a laid-back tone.
In short, colour correction is about fixing colour problems. On the other hand, colour grading is about adding an artistic choice, a style to the film clips. Even graphic designers keep this principle in mind.
Why Color Correction Is Important
At the outset, we touched on how colour correction will set your film apart from beginners, making your filmmaking dream career into reality.
For filmmakers, colour correction is the zest that adds a tang to the film, making people remember the masterpiece not just for the storyline, but also for the cinematics.
Moreover, in this time and age where social media is leveraged for marketing with heavy use of videos, colour correction will also mean being a trustworthy brand or influencer. Content creators are stepping up their game using color correction to get singled out.
Even illustration types of videos like ones from VPNoverview will benefit a lot from colour correction. Though it doesn’t feature real-life footage, colour correction made the video more appealing and professional.
And the benefits of colour correction don’t stop with videos, even those in the eCommerce industry like this costume store are leveraging colour correction for professional-looking images.
Now let’s move over to what you came here for, the 9 examples of how the colour correction is done.
Know Your Footage
Different cameras have different outputs. But to get the best result when doing colour correction, shoot in “log”.
Log means the image initially looks dull, flat, desaturated, and with low contrast. Doing so gives you a big room to retain details when you start correcting colours.
Source: photography.tutsplus.com
On the contrary, when the footage is baked in with high contrast, details on the whites are blown out and the blacks are crushed.
Assign A Hero Shot
As described earlier, colour correction aims to get a consistent look on all footage.
Think about it:
Wouldn’t it be distracting to find footage from one camera angle with a different colour temperature from another?
To achieve consistency, choose a hero shot and start correcting from there. Simply, make it a reference for all other footage looks.
The colourist from This Guy Edits suggests starting with a wider shot of the scene, one that is evened out with middle-of-the-pack levels of contrast making it easier to work around with.
Source: YouTube (This Guy Edits)
Set Up Your Scopes And Interface
Before the actual colour correction process, set up your workspace, depending on the software you’re using, in a way that caters to the colour workflow.
If you’re using Premiere Pro, here’s what you can add to your workspace:
- A reference monitor for shot matching
- 8-bit colour display (but check your footage first to confirm)
- An expanded timeline that covers audio levels (it won’t be needed here anyway)
- On the Lumetri Scopes panel, use Parade (RGB), Vectorscope YUV, and Waveform (but you can also check out other scopes and decide what works best for you
Use the Parade (RGB) with three different graphs (red, green, and blue) to correct white balance and exposure.
Source: fool.com
Use the Waveform (Luma) to fix exposure ranging from 0-100 IRE. (0 absolute black, 100 absolute white)
Bothe these scopes (Parade and Waveform) correspond from left to right.
Also take note that screen calibration, room lighting, and even wall colours alter colour perception on the monitor. If you feel the footage looks off, trust the scopes, they’re never wrong.
Tip: work on a neutral grey room to not throw off the colour.
Input LUTs
Basically, LUTs (lookup tables) are preset. It makes the work faster especially when shooting in “log” because it retains lots of colour information.
It’s a good starting point for additional corrections. You won’t need to keep on shifting the colours in the frame, it applies basic colour correction for you.
Like mentioned earlier, even illustration videos benefit from colour correction. This was done greatly by an introductory video of GloriaFood, a restaurant website builder.
White Balance
Adjusting the white balance changes the footage temperature of the white in the clip to make it naturally white.
When the white balance is off, so will other colours be.
On the clip, find an object that is closest to true white. It can be a sheet of paper, or a dress. Use it as a reference point.
Some colourists use a white card or a slate at the start of each clip as a reference point when doing colour corrections. Choose what works best for you.
Check out the cover image of TimeCamp’s employee attendance tracker blog as well as Keywestaloe’s homepage cover image, the white elements were perfectly balanced.
Temperature And Tint Sliders
After correcting the white balance, use the tint sliders to adjust other colours of the footage.
If the clip looks bluish, move the slide toward the orange area and vice versa.
If the clip looks greenish, move the slider toward the magenta portion and vice versa.
Then look back at the scopes to get a good sense of how balanced the clip is after correction.
Balancing Tone
Balancing the footage’s tones and gamma values can be a bit tricky. Patiently adjust the sliders to notice the effect until you familiarise different shadows and highlights.
Use the Waveform as a guide. Adjust exposure until the reading is between 0-110 IRE. You can then use the parameters listed above to change other tones:
- Black at around 0-20 IRE
- Shadows at around 20-50 IRE
- Highlights at round 50-80 IRE
- White at around 80-100 IRE
Start with the dark tone and progressively to the lighter ones. When properly done, it looks as natural as this:
Source: Premiere Pro
Saturation
Ideally, saturation is the last adjustment you should make. When everything is balanced out, use the saturation slider to enhance the natural look.
Increasing saturation gives an underexposed look and decreasing it, an overexposed look.
Simply, saturation adds vividness, it adds a certain pop without damaging the exposure.
A good example to look at for these are Everytale’s homepage and Roketto’s SaaS marketing blog.
Sharpness
When an image looks too smooth, it lacks the realistic factor. Adding sharpness will make the footage look cleaner, crisp, and competent making it more natural to what the eye sees, unlike Winpure’s how-to videos.
As an example, take a look at the screenshots on the Startup Marketing Agencies blog of GrowthRocks. If they worked on making the images sharper, it’ll add a lot more competency to the content, something Close’s predictive dialer blog was able to do.
Conclusion
While we talk about colour corrections in film, we included image samples from other industries highlighting how color correction is vital not just in filmmaking but also in other fields.
Now you know the tricks, it’s time you give it a try!
Burkhard Berger is the founder of Novum™. He helps innovative B2B companies implement revenue-driven SEO strategies to scale their organic traffic to 1,000,000+ visitors per month. Curious about what your true traffic potential is?
