PROFESSIONAL COLOR GRADING TUTORIAL
(Courtesy of a Professional Editor):
So the reason I'm posting this -- without trying to sound like a narcissist -- is that, unlike many people on this site, I am a professional editor. This means I have quite a bit more experience than most of the editors on this site, regarding particular technical elements of editing and post-production; I therefore could have a lot of valuable information to share, that could help the community improve their edits...
...the biggest area the community could improve upon is color-grading. Specifically, color-grading is a very specific process that can really only be done correctly one way, and therefore takes years to master. Consequently, in observing how most of these edits are made, it is fair to say majority of the community grades their footage
INCORRECTLY. Now you may be saying "what's the big deal? So what if we don't do it the professional way? As long as it works, right?"
WRONG. Doing color-grading incorrectly, by taking an eyeball guess at it, can and will result in your print actually not playing correctly on some screens. Most TVs have a 2.2-2.4 Gamut (range of colors that are visible), the problem is most computers have a
way bigger Gamut. So just eyeballing it on your computer screen won't work, because some of those colors aren't visible on a TV-Screen. This can result in various random black pixels or random white pixels on a TV-Screen if you do it wrong, which I'm sure nobody wants. That's why it's vital that you guys should know how to use RGB monitors, as well as the professional step-by-step process.
And hey, by the way, none of this is a shot or diss at the fanediting community! By all means, most people here are not professionals! You have to do something wrong to learn to do it right, so it's okay that some pretty great faneditors -- even the very best, quite frankly -- have made this critical mistake I'm about to point out. This isn't a "gotcha, idiot, ha ha!" It's just a little insight from a professional; a pointer in the right direction, to help pretty great editors do even better.
* * *
So let's start off by explaining how a professional movie goes through color grading. Believe it or not, it actually starts on set. Movies are purposely shot with a really basic/bland, unstylized color-palette (even if the director knows what he wants the colors to look like); we call this
White Balanced. This is so that we capture the full-range of colors present in a scene, in equal values, giving us a full-range of options when we're in post. If we filmed the footage with the colors already saturated to what we want, we'd be unable to change it later; because we wouldn't have the information from the other colors.
Why is it important to have all the available color information? Well, not all monitors actually display colors the same way. A dark shade of blue on a TV-Screen can actually look like a bright shade of blue on a Computer screen, and both probably look way brighter than it looks on a Projector! So that means, when they color correct movies, they actually make THREE DIFFERENT VERSIONS; each one tailor-made for a different kind of monitor (DCP for Projectors, MOV for TVs, and a unique MOV for Computers).
If you were to put each monitor side-by-side, each displaying their respective version, they'd theoretically look exactly the same... but if you, say, put a Computer MOV on a projector? IT WOULD LOOK TOTALLY DIFFERENT!! It would look nothing like the DCP, because Projectors don't show colors the same way computers do! So by having ALL of the available color information on set, we can actually make sure that we're able to adjust the color grading for each type of monitor. We ensure that by shooting a basic and unstylized color palette...
...this would also be a good word of caution to faneditors about using Digital Downloads, as opposed to Blu-Ray discs, for their masters; since the digital downloads don't have the same color-grading, and for sure will look way blown out on most TV-screens. If you use a digital download, you will NEED to re-grade the entire film to "legal" levels (I'll explain what those are shortly).
[This is what a properly white-balanced shot looks like; this is what came straight out of the camera]
So once the film's final cut is locked, the print is handed off to the colorists. We first start by
Correcting the footage; meaning we make sure each individual shot is properly white-balanced, since even cinematographers can make mistakes. We do this by using the RGB Monitor. Essentially, the brights of each colors should be equal and the darks of each color equal. We want a basic/bland canvas.
We also make sure NONE of the darks are going below the bottom line, and NONE of the brights are going above the top line. If they do this, they are in what's called
Illegal-Levels. Some of you may have heard other terms for this, like colors "clipping" or being "over/under-exposed." The term I've used, however, is the most used one in the industry. Having a print with colors in the illegals will result in most TV-Stations and Theaters refusing to show your film, because they can actually be sued for showing a film that damages the viewer's retinas and/or breaks the bulbs on their TV-screens.
If you have footage in the illegals (usually only one or two shots ever do this), you can adjust the brights using the
Gain and and adjust the darks using the
Offset/Lift. Again, make sure where these levels fall is the same
for all three colors. While you're here, you'll also want to adjust the
Gamma for all three colors; essentially making sure that all the color information isn't just sitting at the bottom or the sitting at the top. It should be spread out across the whole screen. If you guys want my recommendation for softwares that let you adjust these settings, my vote if for Blackmagic's
Davinci Resolve. It's completely free, as well as the most widely used tool for color-correction in the film industry; simply put, because it's the best one out there by far. So using it will allow you to make your footage look as professionally graded as possible.
(we repeat the above steps for every shot of every scene).
Only once we've done that do we start actually
Grading the footage; meaning, we make the artistic decisions about what we want each scene to look like.
[This is what a theatrical grade looks like; this has been processed, corrected, and graded]
So this is what a
GRADED shot looks like. It's important to know how to mix the three primary colors to create other colors, so hopefully you payed attention in art class! You can see that this shot is intentionally given a very gold tint. They probably did this by turning down the blue, and bringing up the green to be just slightly less than the red. The byproduct of changing color levels like this is that it'll bring up the Gain for all of them; so it's a good idea to bring down the gain for all three colors, before you do something like this. That way they won't go up into the illegals when you shift them. Afterward, they probably adjusted the gamma so that it's sitting at the bottom, creating this very shadowy contrast between the brights and darks. Most importantly, despite no longer being equal
NONE OF THE COLORS ARE IN THE ILLEGALS. This is what goes onto a final theatrical print, and is then sent to theaters.
(we also repeat this step for Blu-Rays Discs and Digital Downloads; you wouldn't show a print made for Projectors on a TV-Screen, would you?)
* * *
Right, so now you have a basic understanding of professional color-correction and color-grading for movies... what does any of this have to do with fanedits? Well, it's very common for fanedits to try and
RE-GRADE footage, to have a different look from the original. This is an interesting idea, but the trouble is that most editors -- even the best -- do it completely wrong; so wrong, in fact, that they risk their prints looking spotty on most TVs.
Here's an example!
Some editors might want to re-grade a shot like this:
...seems simple enough. The problem is, most editors want to go from this...
...straight to this.
EEEEEEEEEEEHHHHHH!!!!!! WRONG!
This is a great way to guarantee your footage will go into the illegals, and look beneath professional quality. The problem with doing it this way is that you're
completely skipping the WHITE-BALANCE step in the process!! As I hope I've illustrated by now, that step is there for a reason! You can't just skip it; otherwise, you're footage will end up straight-up blown out! It'll be way too bright! Here's what happens if you try to skip this step:
[Clipping.. aka
HOLY F$CK, WHAT IS THIS DEMONIC ABOMINATION!!??]
[These bastards... the work of the devil, and third-party discs from IMAGE]
You can see that it's now WAY too bright! This is because we have to work so much harder to get the image from golden to blue, because we don't have all the available colors to work from. So the only way to pull that off, without a white balanced shot to work from, is by raising the blue levels so high that the footage is clipping! You don't want clipping sound to create audio distortion in your edit... so why would you want clipping colors to create
visual distortion?
Again, the reason this happens is because we don't have all the color date
UNLESS WE HAVE A WHITE BALANCED SHOT. The gold shot doesn't have all the available color data, since it's already been graded... So
FIRST we need to reverse-grade it; we need to turn it back into a basic white-balanced shot.
So a
CORRECT version of this process would go...
...from this...
...
back to this...
...
THEN to this!
By doing it that way, you're guaranteeing you have all the possible color data to work from! You wouldn't make an oil-painting with only one of the primary colors; you need all three! If you try to go straight to the blue one, by skipping the white-balanced middle-step, you probably won't be able to get the shot you want anyway! Not only that, but you'll probably end up making your footage
Illegal, which can actually break your TV-Screen and seriously damage your retinas. The step is there for a reason, so it's seriously in your best interest NOT to skip it.
* * *
I hope this information is helpful to future faneditors! Again, I don't want this to sound like a jab at the community. I just think it has room to improve its standard of color correction; since most editors on this site appear to be skipping the White-Balancing step, and trying to go straight from Point-A to Point-B. This community holds itself to a high standard, so hopefully this helps you get achieve even better results when grading your footage.
Happy editing! (=
(if any staff like @DigModiFicaTion or @Q2 want to link/save this post for future reference, in the technical help/tutorial threads, feel more than obliged 
)
