COLOR GRADINGĬolor grading is the creative process where decisions are made to further enhance or establish a new visual tone to the project through software including introducing new color themes, re- lighting within a frame, films stock emulations, color gradients, and a slew of other choices. Trust the SCOPES and let them guide you into accurate and creative decision-making. Without them, you are literally flying blind and solely trusting your eyes, which have to adjust to room light ambiance, fatigue, funky monitors, and other factors constantly. The use of SCOPES (Waveform, Vectorscope, Parade) is critical to this step and luckily most NLEs and Grading software have them built-in. This tedious and mechanical process is essential and in its own way, an art form. Each clip is adjusted to match the color temperature to a predefined choice for each scene. COLOR CORRECTIONĬolor correction is the process where every clip is manually tweaked to get good exposure and balance of light. To get on the same page, let’s quickly go over some terminology that clarifies what is what in this realm. That said…the tips I would like to share with you are applicable to all Color Correction software.

I am ecstatic to be integrating Speedgrade into my workflow as it will be part of the upcoming CS6 release. I choose to use Adobe CS5.5 for my Color post work and bounce between After Effects, Photoshop and Premiere as I love the seamless integration it provides. Shane asked me to take this opportunity and pass on some tips and tricks I have learned over the years of Coloring features, shorts, ads, music videos, and documentaries. The smaller the budget and tighter the deadline… the more often this becomes true. In the indie film world, jobs are more often merged and unified and Color Correction is more and more falling into the hands of the Editor. The challenges and choices are many and it comes with great responsibility if you are the one applying the Color Correction and Color Grade. You can also make images look garish, and ugly and destroy all the hard work the crew did to capture those images on the day of the shoot. If you have excellent footage, then the sky is the limit. You can take average footage and really make it pop, sing and enhance the viewing experience of your project. Color correction is just one step of the entire filmmaking process… but oh, what a difference it can make.

Magic bullet looks after effects cs6