Color Grading
Color grading is the stage where a film or photo gets its final look. How it grew out of printer lights in the film lab, and what lift, gamma and gain do.
What is color grading?
Color grading is the stage of post-production where the colors and tones of a film, video or photo are adjusted to give it a look. A grade can be invisible, like warming a scene to match the shot before it, or obvious, like the drained, cold palette of a war film.
It usually comes after color correction. Correction fixes problems so the footage looks neutral and consistent, with whites that are white and skin that looks like skin. Grading is the creative pass on top of that.
Where did color grading come from?
Before digital, the look of a film was set in the lab. A specialist called a grader in Europe and a timer in the USA watched each scene of the negative and chose how much red, green and blue light to print it with. Those settings were counted in printer points, and twelve points doubled the light, so one point was a twelfth of a stop. That's still why colorists talk about timing and points.
Then the whole film went digital. For O Brother, Where Art Thou? in 2000, the Coen brothers and cinematographer Roger Deakins had every frame scanned and graded on a computer, turning the green Mississippi summer into a dusty, burnt yellow. It's widely cited as the first feature graded that way from start to finish, and within a few years most big releases followed.
What do lift, gamma and gain do?
Most grading software has three wheels. Lift moves the blacks, gamma moves the midtones, and gain moves the whites, and each can push toward a color as well as up or down. Raise lift with a touch of blue and the shadows go hazy and cool; add orange to gain and the highlights warm up.
The American Society of Cinematographers wrote this down as the ASC CDL, a format that lets a look travel between programs. It boils a primary grade down to ten numbers: slope, offset and power for each of red, green and blue, plus one saturation value. Slope behaves like gain, offset like lift and power like gamma.
How to grade a photo or clip here
Brighten Image is the primary grade. Brightness multiplies every value the way slope does, Gamma bends the midtones the way power does, and Saturation sets the overall color strength. Start there and get the exposure and contrast right before anything else.
For a stylized look, Gradient Map recolors the picture by brightness, so dark tones take the first color of the gradient and highlights the last. Pick a palette like Gold or Ocean and lower Amount to around 0.3, and the original colors show through under a tint, which is close to what a colorist does with lift and gain. Bleach Bypass Effect gives the silvery, desaturated, hard-contrast look of skipping the bleach step in the lab: Light at 0.25 for a hint of grit, Bypass at 0.5 for the classic version.
Why does the same grade look different on another clip?
A grade works on the tones it's given. Gain pushes highlights, so a clip with a big bright sky changes far more than an interior with no highlights at all. Colorists solve this by balancing every shot to a neutral starting point first, then applying the look. Do the same here: even out each clip in Brighten Image, save, and only then add the gradient or the bleach.
Try it
Bleach Bypass Effect
Bleach bypass effect for photos and video: muted, silvery color and hard contrast, the gritty film look of war movies. From a light touch up to full strength.
Gradient Map
Apply a gradient map to an image or video: its tones run through up to 16 colors you choose, blended in OKLab so the steps between them stay clean. Free.
Brighten Image
Brighten an image or video: lift a dark photo with Brightness, or raise just the midtones with Gamma so bright skies keep their detail. Free, nothing uploaded.