Color Grading
The creative manipulation of color in video and photography to establish mood, emotion, and visual storytelling. It is performed after color correction as an artistic process.
Color grading is the creative process of manipulating the color palette of video or photographic content to reinforce mood, emotion, and narrative intent. Unlike color correction, which aims for technical accuracy, grading intentionally pushes colors to achieve a specific artistic vision.
- Distinction from color correction: Correction normalizes footage by fixing white balance and matching exposure. Grading follows correction and applies creative looks such as teal-and-orange or bleach bypass that define a project's visual identity
- Three-way color wheels: Allow independent hue shifts in shadows, midtones, and highlights. Pushing shadows toward teal while warming highlights is a ubiquitous cinematic technique
- LUTs (Look-Up Tables): Pre-built 3D color transformations stored as
.cubefiles using a 33x33x33 grid. LUTs enable real-time preview and consistent application across clips - Log footage: Cameras shooting in logarithmic gamma (S-Log, Log-C, V-Log) produce flat images preserving maximum dynamic range, providing the widest latitude for grading
DaVinci Resolve's Color page is the industry-standard grading environment with non-destructive node-based processing. For photography, Lightroom's Color Grading panel provides analogous functionality, allowing photographers to tint shadows and highlights with different hues across a series.