Life Lessons From Colour Grading
8 September, 2010
If you head over to my mate Glenn Stewart’s site www.mindscapefilms.com, you’ll not only discover what a talented guy he is, but his excellent use of colour. For a very long time, I used to watch as Glenn would transform something very average looking into something very extraordinary by simply tweaking the colour palette of the images he went for. To the average person you could just try and break it down and go “oh wait, he just threw grain over the top” or “he just did a quick curves adjustment” or “it’s all in the vignette”. But the truth is, there is no “magic bullet” for colour correction (no disrespect Stu Maschwitz, it’s a killer plugin!)
Last year, under the skilled tutelage of Glenn whilst colour grading the Hillsong LIVE ‘Faith+Hope+Love’ album, I thought I had learned enough about colour correction to be able to do the grade for this year’s (yes if you hate the grade of the ‘A Beautiful Exchange’ album, you can blame me!). One of the issues of last year’s album was the song Yahweh. It was lit this horrible blue colour that not only was it solarising on the people’s faces, but also turning them magenta. In past situations, if the colour looked bad, you would just turn it black and white, but in this instance, turning this colour black and white simply came up grey! So the only way to salvage the song was to isolate the magenta colour and bring it back to a more skin tone-ish colour. And seriously, because the picture was so messed up, that is ALL we could do.
This year however was another kettle of fish!
We had a few songs that we shot with brilliant white light, but when you saw it through the camera, it came up temping as blue! “Well Nick, why not just change the colour filter???” haha Eventually we figured we could use the channel mixer filter to push certain colours around and make the colours more like what was perceived with on the night, rather than what was captured on camera.
Anyway, the point being, colour grading is hard mostly because of this reason:
Every situation requires a different solution to solve it.
I would love to say colour grading/correction was just doing “this action”, but to be good at it is going to take practice. It’s like someone asking you how to compose good music, you can give them a general structure, but it takes some talent, finesse and sweat to make it a masterpiece.
Don’t look for the easy out and just level, throw film grain and a vignette on top of the things and say its colour graded. Work hard for your look and understand what you’re doing. I promise you’ll be pleasantly surprised
Nick.
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