January is often a gray, kind of dismal month. Especially after all the color and zing of the holiday season. So I decided to bring some color into the mix by talking about color grading your projects.
Most people spend time lighting for the best possible look, finding the perfect camera shot, editing sequences again and again, layering awesome audio under everything then render and deliver, right?
Wrong!
You left out one of the most important steps in a professional work flow – color grading. And it can raise your production value as much as anything else you can do. And if you’re looking to add some mojo to your project, this is the place to start.
If you take a DSLR out of the box and start shooting you’ll get a factory preset look. Spend a few minutes with the manual or playing with the menu’s on the camera and you’ll discover more preset looks. A bit more time and you’ll learn how to create your own presets.
One of the most important things you can do is create a preset that is flat – take out the extra saturation, extra sharpening, extra contrast and other extras added by the manufacturer to make sure their cameras shoot stunning images.
Yes, you want stunning images but if you shoot them that way and need to correct them later you’ll wish they were not so stunning. That’s why it’s good to learn how to shoot flat images. Here’s brief tutorial showing how this increases the dynamic range of the Canon 7D.
How to increase the Canon 7D dynamic range (Tutorial) from Luka on Vimeo.
Click here to read Stu Maschwitz’s excellent post showing how to do this on a Canon 5d. Should work on a 7D just as well.
Click here for a post showing how to create this preset for a Nikon D90.
Now that you’ve got a good flat image, what can you do with it?
Now you can learn how to creatively modify the color – actually the entire image – to clean up or fix imperfections in your footage, increase the impact of the images in your project, and increase the production value of everything you create.
We’ll spend the rest of the week looking at tools, tutorials and ideas focused on color grading to make your video look more like film than ever before.
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