Colour Grading

Let’s start with what is it? The best way to simplify what a colour grader does is to relate it to adding a filter to Instagram images. This is what colour grading essentially is, however, they manually change the colour, brightness and focus to the exact look or feel the Director is going for. As an example, here is a still shot from a film before any colour grading has been done:

And after the colour grade has been done:

You can see it adds a particular feel to the image and starts to convey a story based on having a feel now, rather than the images in a neutral tone.

This is the basics to colour grading, there are many programs and plugins for editing software that do various levels of colour grading. The most commonly professionally used software is Da Vinci Resolve.

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