Color correction why

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Forgot your password? Password recovery. Recover your password. No menu items! Quick Links. Color Correction vs Color Grading. What is Color Correction? Ways to Color Correct. What is Color Grading? Ways to Color Grade. Some Final Thoughts. HDMI 2. Adobe Premiere is a good place to start:. Different programs do things better than others. Adobe Premiere, for example, is a non-linear editing NLE platform that include a robust menu of color tools.

DaVinci Resolve is an example of a more specialized, stand-alone color program, which also includes editing features. White balance is the same thing in your camera as it will be in coloring programs. It describes the color temperature of your image. If you properly white balance your camera for the scene, you should have images that keep your colors around their intended values. Even if you do this in camera, you'll likely need to make a few necessary tweaks in post to get you home.

Your white balance should be one of the first things you do, because it will affect every single decision you make from there on out. As you can see, scopes are a simple but powerful tool that allow you to properly color correct your footage. Scopes are a monitoring tool that show color and light information on a graph so that you can see the precise balance of these characteristics and how they compare to one another.

Curves are helpful for precise color correction and color grading, and you will want to pair these with your scopes. With curves, you can add points to drag colors to new values, and change shadows, midtones, and highlights with much more precision.

When you make a curves adjustment, you control the entire color channel shift with any movement of the drag points. This generates gradual changes rather than big extreme changes. You can always zoom in and add another drag point to make a small adjustment.

Color match allows you to choose a reference image that will then be analyzed and applied to your target image. This is an automatic calculation, so it is important to check your scopes and use your judgement as to the quality of the color match. Some people even like to use popular film clips as their reference image, and their own personal footage as the target image. If you do, it will completely throw off the value of your colors and ultimately make your life a lot harder than it needs to be.

Often, you could just copy and paste the effects from your previous clip onto an adjustment layer, or through the use of bins, but if your footage has lighting and exposure discrepancies, it may not work very well.

Three-way color correctors are a useful tool for many colorists in professional entertainment, but they have their pros and cons. The three-way color corrector lets you balance the shadows, midtones, and highlights of an image using color wheels. You can set numerical values, or use the control drag point to set your value based on hue.

Color qualifiers give you the chance to change a particular color, or range of colors, without changing the rest of the picture. You can also use color qualifiers to identify colors that you want to fix in place so that they won't change when you adjust other colors and elements in the picture.

In the DaVinci program, color masks are called Power Windows. These work a lot like masks in Adobe Photoshop. You can designate a shape to isolate its colors. If you are shooting in RAW format, you will have a large amount of control over the characteristics of your image. Beyond general quality, this is one of the attractive advantages of RAW, but it eats up a lot of storage This is because RAW images, captured unprocessed by the camera with no set parameters, are uncompressed.

If you are not working in RAW, chances are that you will want to record in a flat picture profile, or Log profile, to give yourself more opportunities when it comes to coloring and enhancing your footage. A picture profile refers to a set of parameters that determine the characteristics of your footage.

Your picture profile can be whatever you want it to be, but generally if it is more "flat" it will give you the best chance to pull out some extra steps of dynamic range, and keep your footage out of trouble. These are essentially neutral picture profiles but not RAW! Color correction methods have changed since entertainment production switched to digital footage, but it is still just as important for professional images.

Color correction refers to adjusting white and black levels, exposure, contrast, and white balance to give you an image with accurate, unprocessed-seeming colors.

The other purpose of color correction is to create visual consistency for your footage and scenes. You want them to match for better flow. If you go rogue, something that looks good to you may look odd to someone else. Color correction eliminates visual inconsistencies. If your color profile is flat, desaturated, and has less contrast, it will allow these additions to have a more positive outcome, and give you a bit more control when coloring your footage.

It also helps you to squeeze out some extra information in between your maximum and minimum values. Think how easy it would be to color the art at the museum if it was flat, desaturated, and had less contrast.

This means that we intend to send our footage through this predetermined adjustment so that we may accurately adjust colors during our correction and grade phase, but …. You output LUT if you choose to apply one is intended to achieve a cinematic look, or sometimes a "film" look. The Rec. Check out this video for a quick primer. When you make coffee in the morning, you pour hot water over ground up beans to get … coffee! Applying a LUT is also an opportunity to white balance your footage, either via the Auto White Balance or manual temperature adjustments.

Not yet. You just want to get as close to true white as you can so that each step works correctly. Unless your footage was shot in a way that the tint helps, chances are you should avoid it altogether. As digital content creators, we all have to find ways to increase the production value without increasing the budget.

In fact, our favorite color correction software to use, DaVinci Resolve by Blackmagic Designs , is free to download. Strong color correction and grading help separate professional content creators from amateurs. As media consumers, we are so accustomed to seeing highly stylized footage in TV shows and films that anything else looks amateur by comparison.

We all strive to create content that is engaging and concise. Color will resonate emotionally with your audience because colors subconsciously generate moods. Emphasizing bright colors in the footage can create an upbeat and happy mood, while making dark, muted tones the focus will set a more serious and bleak tone.

The color in your digital video content is just as much a part of your brand identity as the color of your logo. While more complicated than slapping an Instagram filter on an iPhone video or making everything sepia, the results are infinitely better! Color is emotion. The color of your videos helps keep your audience engaged. And an engaged audience will help your bottom line. In the first example, from Black Hawk Down , the blue is much more saturated, and the brightness is turned down, with the highlights lowered as well.

The effect is a great look for sci-fi footage. In the next example, below, is a landscape shot which also comes from a Ridley Scott film, The Martian. It looks like, well, Mars.