Colour Grading

July 18, 2007 5:48 AM

Colour Grading: Tips, Trick and Other Helpful stuff.

Okay so I've always been interested in the process of colour grading and have just recently started dabbling with Combustion.

I'm looking to move on with maybe Adobe After Affects or something similar to possibly do colour grading jobs for short filmmakers etc in the Brisbane, Australia area.

Any tips or information I should know? Anything at all will help.

posted by thelloydshow to Media & Arts (2 answers total)

There's not much out there on the subject, it seems that most of the highend colourists learn as assistants from masters who guard their secret art. There's a few books out such as Color Correction for Digital Video. It goes through some basic principals. The Dv Rebels Guide is pretty good with a focus on making movies on the cheap with dv and aftereffects (the author is one of the founders of the Orphanage and an ex ILM'er). There's also a pretty active forum about the book. He's even developed some cool colour correction plugins. There's not alot of websites but check out FX guide for some industry info and a half decent forum. Also there's Creative Cow. The best thing you can do is shoot yourself and experiment on your own. See if you can shoot something on your own and give it a "matrix" look. Or see if you can shoot some stuff from different times in the day and have them match. I've been colour correcting for about a decade on a variety of systems (currenty the Avid Symphony). I find a good knowledge of colour matching and really using curves and levels is most important. And knowing how to achieve looks with simple tools instead of reaching for a plugin that has an "instant" look.
posted by phirleh at 11:20 AM on July 18, 2007

Yeah. Learn to read scopes. That's where CC starts.

Call all the post places in town and see if they'll let you trade some AE or combustion work (free) to sit with their daVinci artist.

I'm currently tech editing the sequel to the book mentioned above (and doing a DVD on Apple's Color.)

But 'work' in the field is tough to come by:
First, most productions don't know they need Color correction.
The ones that do, will pay for it (but will go to post houses for it.)
They'll often combine the color correction step with onlining a piece.
Last, 'low cost' 'auto' correctors are now part of most NLEs.

Feel free to drom me a line if you have questions.
posted by filmgeek at 12:49 PM on July 18, 2007