While color correction makes an image look natural, color grading makes an image look “right.” Color grading can make a scene look cold and menacing or warm and inviting. If it is a nostalgic flashback, you may add a warm yellow glow to the scene to give it a feeling of warmth and happiness. If you want to convey that two people in a scene are estranged, you may cool off the colors and desaturate them slightly. Colors can be used to match the mood of your characters or the overall theme of your film. Color is yet another way to tell the story, and while it may be the last step, it shouldn’t be an afterthought.
The tools in which we have today are amazing. You can do anything. You can use a curve to isolate anything, you can use a colour wheel to isolate anything. You can create depth, you can make the viewer look wherever you want to look, you can do secondary colour corrections to touch up skin tones but keep all the rest of the image stylized. You can create a LUT to work on another project with the same style, but the best way to grade is to not use LUTs at all and to learn to actually grade and make it look as if you intended for it to look like that. It’s a fine balance because if you go too far, it looks wrong. But if you don’t go far enough, it looks like un-graded footage.
A large part of grading decisions are dictated by genre. There are certain aesthetic associations that viewers have come to expect from each genre. For example, in the case of drama, viewers often expect a filmic aesthetic with soft roll-offs and teal orange colour division, which adds warmth to skin tones and brings the film to life. Horror movies often use higher contrast, lower saturation with splashes of high saturation to create discomfort and draw the viewer to specific elements in frame. Music promos and commercials are often more extreme in style to make a more lasting impression. By understanding the language of the genre, you can achieve what’s expected of the genre while putting your own unique stamp on the film. Grading should never seem random.
But the real power of color grading lies in the fact that it allows you to shape your audience’s emotional perception of a scene without making the audience aware that you’re doing it. If it’s done well, the viewer feels the atmosphere of the scene, but they’re not aware of the color grading, and that’s how you create a really powerful and evocative visual storytelling. This is the real power of color grading, and as HDR and wider color gamuts become available, we can do even more of it, but it’s still all in the service of the scene. So editors need to learn enough about color grading to be able to get that intuition down. Color grading is like music in a scene, and if you do it right, it adds emotion and emotional impact to the scene. That’s why I love it.