Color Grading
 

I would be interested from others as to how they color grade?

I normally check my blacks & whites and then look at color saturation then maybe a color grad or a black grad in certain areas.
I might also reduce colors using levels or color balance.

Cheers
Simon

*generally* I start with levels/exposure, then go to primary C/C and then Secondary C/C, and move forward from there. Sometimes I've set up a shot for a specific look, and dont' want to do too much with the color, so it may only be secondary C/C.

1- Fix any problems.
Black level too high due to flare or whatnot (e.g. some cameras can be set to record with the wrong black level).
Color/white balance
Overexposure
Consistency

1/2- The overall look you want, applied to the relevant clips/scenes.

3- Detailed corrections, shot by shot basis (for some projects you may not have time for this)
If the lighting is not ideal, you can (to some degree) relight things. Slightly easier to do in AE.
You can relight a scene to change around the composition.
You could also pick apart some of the colors (via secondary CC) if you need a particular color or prop to pop out.

Personally I'm not a big fan of straight-up grads... if possible, I would make it look a little more natural. e.g. avoid the problem where the grad affects foreground objects. If there is also some variation in the sky, you can use the secondary CC to add more tonality to the sky (usually make it darker at the top, and change the hue slightly).


---Some more info here:
http://glennchan.info/fcpugto/
Those were some old presentation notes I have... lots of pictures.

Thanks guys some great ideas/advice.
I duplicate tracks to get a bit more saturation but find my black levels tend to go under and then have to raise them a bit, over all i like the look it gives but some of my Wedding videos have come out a bit on the dark side on some TV sets. I find this the hardest thing to get right.
Regards
Simon

When talking about color grading I often think about "film Look" which I suppose many people are aiming for.

My recent studies have revealed that color grading in movies tend to limit the amount of color variations in the scene.
Often I see that the Green/Red tones are popular theese days, while the blues are saved for night scenes.
By experimenting with color grading I came across a way to get some good results, which may or may not be common.
What I do is use a Color balance effect with Highlight/midtone/shadow correction, in witch you get 9 slider option to tweak your colors.
In order to mimic the popular Green/Red look. Where the overall scene looks slightly green and skintones reddish, I do the following:

set:
Shadow greens to 40
Midtones reds to 40
Highlight Blue to 40

This gives you a initial idea of how the scene will look, and by giving those 3 the same value you ensure the white to stay white.
Then you can begin adjusting the other values untill you have the look you want.. Again, try to keep the values in line so that the sum of shadow/midtone/highlight stay the same.

forinstance: If you add shadow red 10, make sure to add 10 of green and blue in the midtones and highlights also. Failing to do so will shift your whitebalance. (sometimes that might be desired)

A complete setting could look something like this:

shadow red 10
Shadow green 40
shadow blue -25
midtone red 40
midtone green -20
midtone blue 5
highlight red -25
highlight green 5
highlight blue 45

This results in a balanced color grading...
Shadow: 40 + 10 - 25 = 25
Midtone: 40 + 5 - 20 = 25
Highlight: 45 + 5 - 25 = 25

After that I would add a brightness/contrast effect to crush the blacks a bit, and then a hue/saturation filter to desaturate the overall colors slightly.

I attached 2 screen shots to show the result of such a color grading.

Left image is the original shot. Right image is colorgraded.

In this example the values were:

Shadow Red: -20
Shadow Green: 60
Shadow Blue: -100
Midtone Red: 30
Midtone Green: 0
Midtone Blue: -90
Highlight Red: -50
Highlight Green: -80
Highlight Blue: 70

(Off Topic)
 

Hey! How come you can post attachments, and I have one more post than you? Maybe I'll ask Chris in the appropriate forum. Hmph.

I guess Im special...