Color Grading
What is Color Grading?
Colour grading is the creative process of making footage look a specific way ( warm and nostalgic, cold and tense, vibrant and stylised ) to match the mood and tone of the story.
At a glance
- Also known as
- Colour timingDI (digital intermediate)Look development
- Used for
- Establishing visual mood and toneCreating a consistent look across a productionStylising footage for genre or brand identity
- Common tools
- DaVinci resolveAdobe premiere proBaselightFilmlight
- Related terms
- Color correctionLUTColor spaceTeal and orangeContrastColor palette
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How it compares
Colour correction is a technical process that makes footage look accurate and consistent. Colour grading is a creative process that makes footage look intentional and stylised. Both are essential parts of a professional workflow, but they serve fundamentally different purposes and always occur in this order: correction first, grading second.
Think of it like…
If colour correction is tuning a piano, colour grading is composing the music you play on it. Correction ensures everything is working properly and in agreement; grading is where the emotional and artistic character of the piece is established.
Pro tip
When using AI-generated video alongside live footage, establish your colour grade on the live footage first, then use a reference frame from that footage as a target when grading the AI-generated sequences. This makes matching the two sources significantly faster and more consistent.
Types and variations
- Colour grading spans a wide range of styles and approaches.
- Warm grading pushes shadows and midtones toward amber and orange tones to create a nostalgic, inviting, or romantic atmosphere.
- Cool grading shifts tones toward blue and cyan to suggest clinical distance, tension, or coldness.
- The teal and orange grade, one of the most recognisable commercial looks, creates contrast between cool environments and warm skin tones.
- Bleach bypass desaturates colour while boosting contrast, referencing a classical photochemical effect.
- Day-for-night grading converts daylight footage to simulate night.
- Period grading uses colour choices to suggest a specific historical era.
- Each of these approaches can be created from scratch in grading software or approximated using LUTs.
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Try MorphicCommon use cases
- Colour grading is applied in every form of professional video production, from feature films and streaming series to advertising, music videos, and social media content.
- It is used to reinforce genre conventions: horror films tend toward desaturated cool palettes, romantic comedies favour warm golden tones, science fiction often employs cool blues and steely greys.
- Brand identity also drives grading decisions in advertising, where consistent colour treatment reinforces visual recognition across campaigns.
- In AI-assisted workflows, grading can be prompted for during generation and then refined in post, or applied entirely in post-production as a finishing step over generated content.
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FAQs
Colour grading is the post-production process of creatively adjusting the colour and contrast of footage to establish a specific visual mood, atmosphere, or aesthetic style that supports the story and gives the production a cohesive, distinctive look.
Colour correction fixes technical problems to create a neutral, accurate baseline. Colour grading applies creative choices on top of that corrected baseline to achieve a specific visual style. Correction is technical; grading is artistic. Correction always comes first.
Yes. Including descriptive language about colour tone, contrast, and mood: such as 'warm golden-hour grade', 'cold desaturated thriller palette', or 'high contrast cinematic look', which helps AI video models interpret the intended visual style and generate output that already approximates your desired grade.
A LUT, or Look-Up Table, is a preset colour transformation that maps input colour values to output values. In colour grading, LUTs are used to apply a base transform from a camera's log format to a standard colour space, or to apply a pre-designed creative look to footage quickly without building a grade from scratch.
A feature film typically takes between two and four weeks of dedicated grading time for a skilled colourist, depending on the complexity of the material, the number of VFX shots, and the number of revision rounds required. Short-form content can often be graded in a day or less.
A good colour grade supports the story without drawing attention to itself, maintains visual consistency across all shots, uses colour to reinforce the emotional and tonal intentions of the scene, and gives the production a distinctive identity that feels purposeful rather than accidental.
DaVinci Resolve is the industry-standard tool for professional colour grading and is used on the majority of major film and television productions. Its free version includes professional-grade colour tools and is suitable for independent and commercial work at any level.
