Film Guides / How movies are made
Color grading
Color grading sets the final look of a film: contrast, mood and consistency from shot to shot. Here is how colorists work and what LUTs, log and HDR mean.
The colors you see on screen are rarely exactly what the camera recorded. In color grading, a specialist called a colorist works with the director and director of photography to set the final look of every shot. A good grade is invisible: it simply makes the film feel the way it should.
Color correction versus color grading
The work happens in two layers:
- Correction fixes problems and creates consistency. Shots filmed at different times of day need to match when cut together. Skin tones should look natural. Exposure is balanced.
- Grading is creative. It gives the film its mood: warm and golden, cold and steely, bleached, rich or high contrast.
From the lab to the digital intermediate
In the photochemical era, the equivalent work was color timing. A lab technician adjusted the red, green and blue printer lights for each shot when printing the film. Options were limited to overall changes.
Around 2000, the digital intermediate (DI) process arrived. Film was scanned into a computer, graded digitally with far more control, then recorded back to film or, later, delivered as a digital cinema package. Today almost every film is graded digitally, whatever it was shot on. For the color story before digital, see Technicolor.
The colorist's toolkit
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| Lift, gamma, gain | Adjust shadows, midtones and highlights separately |
| Color wheels | Push the color balance of each tonal range |
| Curves | Fine control over contrast and individual colors |
| Qualifiers (keys) | Select one color range, such as sky or skin, to change only that |
| Power windows | Shapes that limit an adjustment to part of the frame, like brightening a face |
| Tracking | Lets a window follow a moving subject |
| LUTs | Lookup tables that convert footage from one color space or look to another |
Log footage and LUTs
Digital cinema cameras often record in a log format. Log footage looks flat and gray because it stores as much highlight and shadow detail as possible. On set, a LUT (lookup table) is applied to the monitors so the crew sees a normal-looking image. In the grading suite the colorist starts from the full log image, which leaves room for creative choices.
Common looks and what they say
- Warm and golden: nostalgia, comfort, summer, the past.
- Cool blue: night, isolation, technology, cold.
- Teal and orange: warm skin tones against cool backgrounds, popular in action films because the contrast makes faces stand out.
- Desaturated: harsh realism, bleakness.
- High-contrast black and white: timeless, stylized.
Some films use different looks for different places or timelines so audiences always know where they are.
SDR, HDR and cinema
Films are graded for different screens. A digital cinema projector has a defined brightness and color standard, set out in the DCI specification. Home televisions use other standards, and HDR (high dynamic range) versions allow brighter highlights and deeper shadows. A major release may get separate passes for standard cinema, premium formats such as Dolby Cinema, and home HDR and SDR. See projection for how the image reaches the screen.
Watch a film's trailer and then the film itself. Trailers are sometimes graded before the film's grade is finished, so colors can differ noticeably.
Why it matters to viewers
Grading can make a modest location feel epic or a bright day feel threatening. It also explains why the same film can look different on your phone, your TV and a properly calibrated cinema screen, and why the cinema is where the colorist's work is seen as intended.
