Color Grading is an essential part of content creation. Most people do color grading without even realizing it. There are a variety of software artists who change and adjust color. Color grading helps create a mood that is invoked by the color palette. It is different from color correction, which makes images look exactly like they appear in real life. Color Grading is helpful in conveying a visual tone. There are a few things one deals with when color grading. They are as follows:
- Curves: These are used to remap the brightness and color of an image or video. It is used to control the shadows, mid-tones, highlights, and red and blue channels to create different color effects. This is a great tool for subtle adjustments as it gives a good range of control over how the shift happens.
- White Balance: It helps make the overall image warmer or cooler. Adjusting this regularly across the project changes its general mood.
- Color Match: Color match tools are used to analyze the colors of any reference image and adjust the color of the projected image and match it correctly. It is useful when one has a specific type of look as a reference image for any project.
- Brightness and Contrast: Brightness refers to the overall lightness and darkness of any image, while contrast means the relative lightest and darkest within an image. It is helpful to narrow down or increase the light gaps between elements in an image and make them pop up.
Understanding color grading can help set up moods for projects and engage many senses in an image or video. It can convey underlying messages through the mood it sets. Therefore, having a good sense of colors is helpful to make the work stand out.
Learn Color Grading With These Online Courses
Following is a list of courses that can improve one’s skills in color grading and help develop professional-level work.
1. Color Grading with Da Vinci Resolve: Beginner to Advanced [Udemy]
This course is taught by Matthew Falconer and has a rating of 4.5 stars on Udemy. This course gives a detailed insight into the workflow of color grading in post-production, used in the industry. Da Vinci Resolve is a premier software in the professional industry. Learning it will help beginners understand the essentials of color grading. The course has a runtime of 32 hours and 30 minutes spread over 129 lectures.
2. Secrets of Color Grading in Photography [YouTube]
Joanna Kustra teaches this course. The course has a total run time of 1 hour and 17 minutes. It covers all essential details about color grading and understanding colors in photography. The video includes color theories given by Joana and helps one find one’s own style and use them in practice.
It gives ideas about color and color theory and then uses examples to relate these with real-life projects and images.
3. Premier Pro Lumetri 2020: Color Correct and Color Grade [Udemy]
This course starts with a deep dive into practical examples and real situations. The instructor, Jordy Vandeput, has an experience of over 10 years. The course is divided into two sections with a total runtime of 1 hour and 59 minutes. It teaches about the Lumentri controls and how they work. It also includes advanced color correction tasks like matching levels and the color of different clips.
By the end of the course, a beginner will have a complete understanding of the different color correction tools within Adobe Premiere Pro’s Lumetri.
4. Easy Steps for Beginners to Start Grading [YouTube]
This is a 32 minutes course with talks about color grading using DaVinci Resolve. The tutor is a professional colorist based out of Los Angeles. This is a software-centered tutorial. Therefore, it is a good watch for people interested in picking DaVinci Resolve as software. This software is widely used in the color grading industry and is a good skill to pick up in 2023.
It is a short and well-organized course that is helpful for any beginner to learn about the art of color grading.
5. Cinematic Color Grading: Making your Videos Come Alive [Udemy]
This course is created by Matti Haapoja and has a rating of 4.1 stars on Udemy. It has 30 lectures spread over 1 hour and 57 minutes. It focuses on programs like Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, and Da Vinci Resolve. However, the flexibility of the course allows these tips to be used in any editing program.
It also looks into the use of color wheels, curves, denoisers, scopes, LUTs, and many more. It helps videographers create professional color grades on their films.
6. Da Vinci Resolve for Beginners [Domestika]
Alex Berry, a professional colorist, teaches this course. It teaches in-depth about Davinci Resolve programs; their basic and advanced applications in making great videos. It comprises 41 lessons spread over 5 hours and 9 minutes. It deals with topics like color correction, film and video, photography, TV, post-production, video editing, and grading.
It is a bestseller basics course on Domestika and is recommended for beginners.
7. Color Grading in Photoshop [YouTube]
This tutorial series comprises various examples which give good ideas about color grading in different situations. To color-grade images, it is crucial to set the mood of the scene upfront. Contrasts and brightness play a crucial part in this process.
The course consists of a set of 15 videos, each having a different environment and mood. This is an excellent way of learning color grading. It gives a hands-on experience of each instance through a detailed process video. This is a very thorough way of understanding the basics of color grading using Adobe Photoshop.
8. Everything “Color” in Photoshop [YouTube]
This tutorial is taught by Umesh Dinda from the YouTube channel PixImperfect. It comprises 31 videos that talk about color as a concept and teaches beginners and professionals about the importance of colors in their projects. Enhancing color to make images pop out is an important skill to hone in graphic design and publications. It is crucial to get the color grading right, as it tends to look a little fake if done incorrectly.
This tutorial will talk about several techniques like the ‘Selective Color Adjustment Layer,’ which are helpful in color grading and correction. It even deals with the basics of RGB and CMYK and moves on to the selection, changing, and modification of colors. This series is a great watch for beginners to understand color grading.
9. Color Grading: An Absolute Beginner’s Crash Course [Skillshare]
Fred Trevino teaches this course. He is a professional colorist and a top teacher on Skillshare. The course has eight lessons spread over 53 minutes. It breaks down color correction and grading into basic steps.
The skills learned here can be translated across several editing software. It is ideal for any beginner looking for a color grading and correction crash course. It teaches about various elements of grading, such as lift, gamma, gain, highlights, shadows, contrast, saturation, temperature, tint, and so on.
10. Adobe Lightroom Classic 2021: How to Color Grade Your Photos [Skillshare]
Tom Koi teaches this course on the basics of Lightroom. He is a professional photographer and graphic designer. This course talks about the essence of color grading and tries to explain what color grading really is. It goes on to talk about the emotions behind colors and how it is utilized to imbibe certain emotions in the mind of the viewer.
It talks about color harmony and the rules associated with it. Apart from this, it also teaches some technical knowledge about creating presets out of the saved color grades. All this information is given by 16 well-structured lessons spread over 1 hour and 42 minutes. It is an ideal course for beginners.
Conclusion
Color grading is used across various industries related to design and art. Color grading helps to establish the premise of a scene by setting up the mood. Often it is easy to detect the mood by taking a glance at the project. This technique is often used in the film industry and is a widely appreciated and in-demand skill in filmmaking.
A good sense of color is necessary for most creative fields. Be it still pictures or motion pictures, color grading can easily bring life to bland images. As motion picture revolves around storytelling, a good atmosphere of the clips can help send the mood through to the audience.
It is particularly helpful for cinematographers and photographers. But, at the same time, it is widely used in digital art and animation. Therefore, color grading is a great skill that you should learn in 2023.