
With the coming of color film processes, the lab became more involved, with the eventual creation of the Hazeltine, a machine for lab film timing. For some projects, you could even get each film frame hand-colored, though that was a highly labor-intensive process. You could buy film stock in various "tints," with many films releasing with entire tinted reels. Even in black and white projects, you could affect brightness and contrast through the time spent in the bath, with every studio having their own lab and custom processes to create signature looks. While some trace the history of color grading to the 1980s with video color grading tools, in truth filmmakers have been adding and affecting the color and brightness of their projects from the birth of cinema. Language is fluid and can carry over from one technology to the next. We still say "striking" when turning on a light, even though originally that referred only to the "strike" of an arc lamp, which doesn't apply to an LED. It would be pedantic to restrict timing to only film projects at this point since there are many other terms we use from older technology that we still use without worrying about. You would use a stopwatch to time how long the film was in a bath, which would affect how the image looks, hence the term "timing." Even though it's a film-specific term, you'll still hear many filmmakers refer to the digital color grading process as "timing." It's simply an accepted use of the phrase. Even in film days cameras wanted to expose the widest latitude possible. You want to wait as long as possible in the process to throw that information away, so cameras focus on exposing the widest latitude possible. To make it look good, you'll need to give up some of that information to focus the eye where you want it to look. You want a camera that is exposing for the widest range of information possible. Well, there are two big reasons for this.

Some people wonder, "Why do you even need to do a color grade? Why doesn't the camera just look perfect when you shoot it?"

It's a vital step of almost every single video, and understanding it is going to help you craft more compelling images.

Sometimes thought of as " Photoshop for moving images," color grading is the step in our image crafting pipeline where we manipulate the image to make it look a certain way. You've seen a commercial or feature film with a certain look that your project doesn't have, and you've asked what made it look like that, only to get the answer, "Oh, that's color grading."
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Are you wondering what color grading is and how to ensure your projects have the best color grading possible? Read on.Ĭhances are, you've landed here because you've started to wonder why your footage doesn't look like someone else's.
