Working Video Color Grading To Your Advantage

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When people are moved by videos that they have just watched, they don’t realize how much color grading has played a role in bringing such powerful images to their screens.

Visual effects, the angle of the shots, and lighting all work together to create a fantastic image, the colors used and the methods that were utilized generate the amazing "experience" when you watch a show, an episode, or a movie.

We may not realize it even as we focus our attention on the film. Still, directors, designers, and cinematographers alike know how impactful the perfect mixture and play of color and light is when it comes to the overall quality of a video. Colors are such crucial elements that there is even a job post dedicated to colorists alone to ensure that this task is done right.

Now, you may be thinking, will this information help people who are not involved in producing a movie? Will you be able to use your learning to create your videos like those of the professionals? I fall you're planning to make are short clips for your YouTube channel or your social media accounts, do you still need to know about color video filters.

Keep reading and know how you can turn your simple videos to amazing ones by working with the light and color aspects with some color video filters. Before we dig in, let’s get to know the basics.

Your Image and its Visual Elements

Before you can even begin enhancing your videos in terms of color and lighting, you have to know the essential visual points that you are looking at and how you can alter them to be significantly better. This discussion will familiarize you with the technical jargon to learn about the feel and look of images that have nothing to do with your camera lens or even your camera placement.

Here are some terms that you will want to add to your vocabulary.

Contrast

Contrast measures how far away your darkest aspect to your lightest one is in your video. A high contrast film means that the dark areas are dark, and the light parts are intensively light. On the other hand, a low contrast translates to faded dark parts and too much highlighting on the bright ones. For both scenarios, the balance or the mid-range is muted.

Temperature

As you know, colors are categorized based on their temperature in the spectrum, and they can be warm (yellow, orange, red) or cool (green, purple, blue). This temperature will play a massive part in how your video sends across the message to your viewers.

Saturation

Saturation is your color intensity when you take your shots. This aspect may be edited in posts but not so when your film has been excessively exposed. The key is to achieve that perfect exposure level in your location so that it’s easier for you to make adjustments in saturation later on.

Hue

Hue is the color of the light that is absorbed in your image. For instance, if your shot's angle is upwards, looking up towards the sky, you will have blue shades of hue. If you capture trees, then you will have green hues.

Exposure

This aspect dictates how bright your video is, directly related to your camera lens's light exposure while taking shots. The exposure is something that you can adjust in your equipment by configuring the aperture settings or maybe do some digital editing on the images produced with the help of excellent editing software.

Now that we have acquainted ourselves with the various terminologies concerning colors and visuals, let’s find out how color is processed.

How do you process color?

As soon as you are done with your shoot for your video project, you can start putting together all the clips and film snippets and create an assembled file for editing. Depending on how you want them to be laid out in chronology, you can create your final output by moving things around and developing your finished product.

Other areas that you can work on while you're editing are the pacing of the videos, the trimming, and then achieving a picture locked phase, which is so much closer to your final cut. By this time, your video is now ready to be edited for the color components. The entire process is known as “color correction.”

Choose your editing software very carefully as you will be limited in your color correction efforts depending on the in-built colors in the system. Most professionals use DaVinci Resolve or anything quite similar to it, but this one had been the most widely used editing application and the standard for the past decade. If you’re not comfortable yet navigating your way around this type of editing software, you can take advantage of online tutorials to help you out.

If the color correction process is something that you have no time or skills for, you can always hire a colorist or a professional color editor to work on your videos for you.

How grade videos?

So, what are the countless ways that you can color your videos? Let’s get to it.

Camera Lenses

There are various techniques to make your color video filters work for you. If you have already set up a color theme for your clips right from the start, you can even use specific camera lens filters with integrated colors. This strategy is ideal, but you must have all color schemes planned to a hilt before you begin since changes you need to make later on will be limited by various factors.

However, it's not impossible to do heavy editing, especially with software available today. It's crucial, though, to store all your color possibilities and your raw shots so you can always go back and start on a new idea should your current one doesn’t work out.

Color Palettes

Instead of starting from scratch in terms of color themes, you can opt to utilize color palettes for your videos. More often than not, one particular color scheme will work to serve the purpose of your video's overall feel and style. What are these color palettes?

Complementary Palette

We are all familiar with what we call the complementary colors or those that contrast each other or sit opposite each other in the color wheel, but then they work to make a fantastic combination. When you use them side by side, both colors are emphasized beautifully.

Typical colors used in movies are the blues and the oranges, particularly in films packed with action scenes. One example will be the movie, "Mad Max: Fury Road," where this specific color palette was utilized to make the set up stand out and create an excellent look to the scene.

Another complementary color palette that works is the purple and yellow mix that brings, this time, a romantic and feel-good scenario to movies like the “La La Land," which is also a musical.

Analogous Palette

Another coloring that helps is the analogous scheme that employs two colors in the wheel that sit next to each other. As opposed to the contrast that the complementary colors present, the analogous palette will bring no such striking distinction, but the colors will "support" each other.

In the movie, "Children of Men," there are dominant darks used and some grays that acted as aiding colors to the main ones. You can also put some accent hues to the mix, but the general sentiment brought about by this palette is a bleakness to the situation appropriate for sad and depressing scenarios like post-war situations or funeral shots.

Monochromatic Palette

As the name implies, you pretty much employ just one-color shade for your videos in this scheme. For instance, in the film, "Blade Runner 2049,"there was a scene of utter destruction that only used the color palette orange brown to depict a derelict and hopeless world. This palette is typically utilized when you want to bring the viewers to the character's mind in the scene or to invoke the same emotions from them that the actor in the movie feels.

Using a single color for your videos is a choice that you can make to achieve a specific visual purpose so take time to decide for your film.

Color Associations

Some colorists will opt to focus on specific colors. It may be whichever palette works and associate it with a particular theme, object, or even character in videos. There has to be consistency in presenting a specific color along with intended associations to pull this off.

To give you an idea, you can decide to link the color blue to an actress in your film and do some excellent editing to make them pop out in vibrant streaks while the actress is in the scene. You can do this repeatedly until the association sinks into the minds of the viewers. Eventually, they will start to see the colors and think about the actress even when she’s not around.

You can even go as far as to plan this from the beginning and use costumes and set design to support the color association. The color saturation can also help you by making the chosen colors highly intense in scenarios where the associated character is present and the other colors subtle or muted to make the contrast even more distinct. A famous example of this is in the film, "The Schindler's List," where a young girl is wearing a red dress while the rest of the world is depicted in black and white.

Color Transitions

Transitioning in your storyline will also be significantly helped by colors. A typical technique is to show a gloomy and depressing scene in one instance through drab colors and then vibrant and alive colors in the next frame to reveal a stark transition between death and life.

More often than not, these color transitions are used to support the narrative of your movie. Though color correction is meant to mesh together seamlessly to create a holistic theme for your video, transitioning colors will help you bring focus to individual story plots and crucial parts in the unfolding.

No Color

Black and white movies are the norm in the 30s or the 40s, but the film producers and directors could make it work by using shading, lighting, tonal shifts, and shadows to create dynamic scenes.

This color scheme may still be used today, and it's relatively easy because all you need to do is to utilize a black and white filter and you're good to go. You can enhance your film's look and feel and avoid making it seem dreary or grim just because of the lack of colors.

A perfect example of a black and white film that worked to its advantage is the movie "Roma." It even bagged several academy awards because of its cinematography. With the help of frames which are broad and vast and rich detail in the visuals, an outstanding film was produced with countless iconic captures with even the minute things like a puddle on the ground or light reflections on the water.

Final words

Ultimately, it's up to you to make color video filters work to produce a good film. It's best to create a storyboard to map out your color plans and create fantastic visuals for your videos.

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