AKA TEN THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW YOU COULD DO IN A DI COLOR GRADE
1.
Shooting in LOG or RAW makes a huge difference to your color grade. LOG is like shooting film, RAW is like being able to change the film stock after you’ve shot, so shooting log or RAW gives you the maximum amount of detail in an image to color grade.
2.
Limit grading to 10-15 minutes at a time per shot. The hardest thing in a colour grade is to stay colour neutral when you’re staring at a still of a moving image indefinitely. Even in a perfectly calibrated grading suite, it’s hard to judge colours without a break. Ben and I always try to limit colour grading one shot to a maximum of 15 minutes. Legendary colorist Arthur Cambridge limited himself to 3 seconds per shot, but I find I need 10-15 minutes to properly study a shot in context. If we’re still trying to crack a shot after that, we skip it and come back to later when we’re refreshed with other images. I also like flipping back and forth from the original to the graded image to make sure it’s the graded image I prefer. If I don’t, we save this image as a variation, and start fresh, then compare again. By narrowing down your choices to only two versions, you’re better placed to make the right decision rather than being overwhelmed by choices.
3.
Keep your images in LOG or RAW for the grade. Take care your LUTs are not baked into your images in post before you start grading or you’ll lose all that detail you went to the effort of shooting LOG or RAW in to play with. Some post houses that refuse to use LUTs saying that “real colorists don’t use LUTs” but the counter argument to this is that real colorists know how to use LUTs properly.
4.
Use a custom LUT You can either start from scratch or use a standard camera LUT. Don’t buy one of the thousands of gimmicky off-the-shelf LUTs available. There are always time pressures by the time you get to the color grade, so LUTs can save you time because it means half the work is done before you start grading. And even if the client (or you) decide to change direction with the look, the LUT is still a shortcut to getting the balance right before you start playing above and under the LUT.
5.
You can make adjustments to a LUT. Even if you’ve got a LUT you like, but you want to change some aspects of it, it’s very easy to make changes and save these as its own LUT.
6.
Lift, gamma, gain & saturation are inter-related. Making changes to one, will make changes to the others, so you need to always monitor all three controls simultaneously. For example, if you darken a vignette with a grad, the saturation increases. Likewise, when you brighten it up, the saturation decreases, so that can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on what the shot is. On a sky, a dark vignette looks great, but if you’re adding a bi of shading to a face, you’ll probably want to use some desaturation so that the skin doesn’t turn orange.
7.
When you darken down a vignette or a grad, use the midtones. Adjusting the midtones will give the vignette or grad a more natural, organic looking shading.
8.
You can grade your VFX shots in layers. One way is by asking the VFX house for the layers with alpha channels. The convention is that most post or VFX houses prefer to colour grade the composited shot in house, which is understandable as they retain control of the VFX so that everything matches for quality control. But for the director, this means you don’t get the chance to adjust the grade after a shot has been composited if the rest of the film has had any grading adjustments while waiting for the VFX components to be completed. Alpha channels separates the VFX from real footage, so they allow you to colour grade both above and below the VFX so that you can fine-tune the look to exactly what you want. Grading in ACES is another means to achieving this.
9.
Grade with curves after adjusting lift, gamma and gain. It’s too easy to mess up the image by making changes with curves on top of changes to curves – but they’re great for making subtle changes.
10.
Finish your colour grade with your midtones. This is the special sauce of colour grading, the final step that turns the amazing to the sublime. While shadows and highlights are important tools to colour grade with, 90% of the game happens in the midtones. By pushing up the luminance gain, you add that oomph to your image. Balancing your midtowns won’t make a bad shot great, but when everything else is working, pushing your midtones just makes it that much better.
