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What is Color Grading?

Sometimes Photos & videos captured by the camera show different colors compared to real life. Similarly, what the movie director sees after a shoot or what the audience sees in theaters comes with huge differences. It requires Professional editing to fix these color issues. This is where Color Grading comes in for editing and recreating the actual colors similar to real life.

In this article, we’ve covered everything about color grading, its importance, and the difference between color grading and color correction.

What is Color Grading?

Color Grading is a process of editing in colors, contrast, and saturation of any image/video to make it more stylish and change its visual appearance to be more bold and eye-catching. The color grading process includes colors, contrast, saturation, hue, details, etc., to enhance the quality of the image/video. You can do advanced level editing and change the complete look & feel of the image/video to make it a more realistic and attractive appearance. 

Also, you can do editing by adjusting light, dark, hue, luminance, and shadow effects in the image/video for cinematic effects. Color Grading is mostly used to add cinematic effects in films and make the visual appearance more attractive and eye-catching.

Why do you need Color Grading?

There are two main reasons to use color grading. First, you need to understand that the camera can’t capture the image/video with cinematic effects as per requirement. The camera is only used to capture the scene in the best possible way with the widest latitude and left with color issues, dust, and lighting issues that need to be removed in editing. Second, color grading allows anyone to edit the image/video as per their look & feel and enhance the quality to add more cinematic and realistic effects. 

In simple words, if you want to enhance the visual appearance of the image/video and need to remove all the issues like lighting, dust, and mismatched colors, you require color grading.

Difference between Color Grading & Color Correction

There’s a difference between both, and many people are confused about the difference. Let’s find out!

Color Correction

Real Estate Lightroom Post Processing

Color correction is a process in which each photo or video clip is compared with real-life colors and edited to match accurate colors. It’s all about recoloring the photo/video and balancing its colors to make its appearance more eye-catching and attractive. Color correction is required to get back actual colors in photos/videos.

Color Grading

Color grading is used after color correction. With color grading, you can do high-level editing in color by adjusting colors, contrast, saturation, hue, details, and many other details to make the photo/video more eye-catching and attractive. It’s mainly used to enhance the visual appearance of the image/video in the most eye-catching way.

What softwares can be useful for color grading?

There are so many tools available for color grading, but we’ve handpicked some topmost color grading softwares. 

If you’re looking for a color grading tool at the initial stage, then you can start with Adobe Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro because both tools come with basic features that can help you to do color grading in photo/video.

If you’re an experienced editor and now looking for a better tool for color grading, then you can consider the DaVinci Resolve color grading tool to do advanced editing, including visual effects (VFX) and detailed editing.

For professional photographers, Adobe Photoshop is the best software with all the necessary features required to do great color grading. Go with Adobe Lightroom with basic editings like saturation, contrast, exposure, hue, and color balance if you’re a beginner. 

If you’re looking for a Professional-level color grading tool for film editing or photography, use the Color Grading Central tool. It’s the most advanced software that comes with tutorials and workshops to learn how to use this software for professional editing. 

How to do Color Grading? 

You can pick any software as per your image editing requirements, and once you’ve picked software, you need to consider the key points while doing color grading. Let’s see!

  • White Balance: You need to focus on photo/video white balance because it handles the overall look. So adjust the white balance according to look and feel.
  • Color Correction: You need to resolve mismatched colors and recolor their actual colors to look more sharp and eye-catching.
  • Brightness & Contrast: These two are essential factors to enhance the quality of photos/videos. Adjust the brightness and contrast as per the image of lightning and darkness. 
  • Curves: Curves help to control shadow, tones, highlights, colors, and other adjustments that require better quality.

Final Verdict

Color grading can enhance the quality of image/video, and it’s important to use color grading for better visual appearance. 

Whether you can choose to do editing on your own or hire a professional photo editing service provider like Photo Editing Company to enhance the quality of photos and deliver you more eye-catching, flawless, and attractive photos/videos. Contact us today to use our professional photo editing services at affordable prices.