Colour Grading Workflow

Colour grading is an important step, and usually one of the final steps before the film is completed. Since the digitalization of film, colour correction have become easier to access, and a lot easier to manage. But the word easy and colour correction are still two words you should not use in the same sentence. Colour correction has got a lot of different aspects to it, and I will look into some of these aspects here.

 

DaVinci Resolve is one of the most in-depth programmes used for colour correction and grading. It works by allowing the user to grade the footage in different layers also known as nodes. Nodes are like layers in Photoshop, and you apply a layer after the previous one, or in between the shots depending on what kind of picture you are trying to achieve. The different types of layers allow separation of different aspects of the image for cleaning up and detailed tweaking. 

Through nodes, it is possible to create a natural looking image, before it undergoes intense colour grading. Fixing whitebalance is usually one of the first steps to correct the image, and since it can be done on a seperate node, it is always possible to "go back" and make changes to this specific part of the image. DaVinci also allows the user to tweak the colour space for more detailed handling. This process will often secure better highlights and shadows, since all channels are separated in the program. 

One workflow I have found interesting is to separate the luma and the chroma channels in davinci resolve. When seperating these two aspects into seperate channels, it allows the user to clean up colour noise, without affecting the luma. 

After the final lock of the picture in the NLE software, it is possible to import aaf, edx or even xml files into the project, and thereby round-trip from one program to the other. This creates flexibility in terms of colour grading, since it is always possible to return to resolve for later colour tweaking.