Introduction
Color grading is a post-production technique used in filmmaking, photography, and videography to enhance the visual experience of a content. It involves adjustments made to color, brightness, contrast, and other properties of an image to create emotion and set a mood. In this blog, we will explore what is color grading, its purpose, how to do color grading, popular tools to do it, and common errors while color grading.
What is Color Grading in Photography?
In photography, color grading helps us set the time of day like morning or evening, warmer or cooler, or mood of the scene, such as happy or sad. Color grading also allows correcting the white balance in a photograph. It makes your content more interesting and visually appealing. The technique uses color elements in multiple balance combinations. This helps to shape the visual content based on the script and visual requirements.
How Color Grading Enhances Visual Content?
The color adjustments made during color grading helps achieve the desired look or feel for the visual content. It enhances the visual content to bring the right mood and emotion in the scene through colors. Cinematographers often work with professional colorists to develop specific color schemes for scenes, characters, or script. Whereas in photography, color grading allows photographers to creatively display their images beyond a simple photograph.
Key Elements of Color Grading:
Various elements help with professional color grading. Working on these elements enhances color tones and visual creativity, and also helps come up with a new masterpiece.
· Exposure — Exposure controls how bright or dark the whole image will be.
· Contrast — Contrast is a key element in an image that makes colors and tones inside the photo look more different from each other.
· Color balance — Color Balance helps adjusts the balance of colors like adjusting various aspects, such as hue, luminance, or shade or intensity of color.
· Hue — Hue is a part of color balance that refers to any color tint that modifies or changes the shade of color making something look more green or purple.
· Saturation — Saturation refers to the intensity of the color adjusted to make the shades look more vivid and bright or muted and dull.
· Luminance — Luminance as the name suggest is the level of light in a color.
Note : In a color palette hue, saturation and luminance all have their own character. They have certain differences in them and are determined by the help of particular aspects in an editing software.
Tools/Software for Color Grading
Our smartphones, computers and even digital cameras come with built-in photo editing software that can apply basic color grading to the images. Have you heard about Snapseed, Google’s magic editor, Fotor, Pixar? These all are free image editing software available on our smartphones. They can help with the editing and color correction in an image.
While professional color correction can be done using photo editors like Capture One, Apple Color, Lightroom and Photoshop, and high-grade software like DaVinci Resolve and Assimilate Scratch, etc.
These options are popular because of their precision color grading and ability to handle high-resolution image files with ease.
How to Get Started with Color Grading
If you are a beginner, the first step to color grading is observing how small color tweaks can impact the look and feel of an image. You can explore and learn by making basic adjustments in free software to understand their effects on an image.
Observance is key to understanding color grading. Save multiple versions in case you want to carefully study the effects each time you make some edits. Try making reference examples from other color-graded photos that can work as inspiration in the beginning.
Common Color Grading Mistakes
Color grading is all about experimenting. However, there are certain risks that a beginner must watch out for while experimenting with their snapshots. Sometimes, color-grading adjustments may not get appropriately executed, making images appear unnatural or hyper-stylized. Grading can also lead to unhealthy skin tones and alter other natural tones. This may make images appear brighter or darker than required.
Besides color or visual mismatches, severe issues like file or image corruption can also go through color grading process. However, the possibility of image corruption is high when you use a free or light version of image editing software, which cannot handle high-resolution images. Thus introducing green lines, black or gray bars, unexpected compressions, distorted colors, much noise or others.
How to Repair Damaged Photos Before and After Color Grading?
Color grading is designed to enhance the images and add life to them. However, accidental damage or corruption can ruin even the best work. Also, you may want to edit an image that is already corrupted. Don’t worry; not all hope is lost. Professional photo repair software can help repair severely corrupted photos.
We suggest the Stellar Repair for Photo tool to help remove green lines, scratches, and other defects while reconstructing missing details. After repair, photos will be ready for color grading without flaws caused by previous damage or errors.
Conclusion
Color grading is a fun way to enhance your photos. While, mastering color grading takes time and experience, it can be enjoyed most as a learner. By understanding basic techniques, learning from others, and using the right tools, beginners can start enhancing their images with color adjustments. However, sometime using color grading may spoil or damage photos, which can only be resolved by tools like Stellar Repair for Photo.
