Colour Correction

October 27th, 2008

I recently went to Power Post in Halifax to do what is called an "Online Edit" for the Chris Cummings music video, "Welcome Back", with Power Post colourist, Reynold Gregor.

In production, often there are 2 types of edits, "offline" - which is where the entire sequence of your project is peiced together exactly how you would like it...its locked. The "online edit" is when the final bells and whistles are added to a project to get it ready for broadcast. Often high-resolution titles are added, its up-rezed to the best possible quality and most importantly, it's colour corrected!

A couple of people asked me. "Is colour correction that important?" Yes it is! It's one of the most important steps you can take to get your project looking professional. Most, if not every single thing you see on TV, and on the big screen is heavily colour corrected. Not only to correct errors in colour balance and exprosure, but to give the piece a certain feel.

For example in the series "Band of Brothers", they de-saturated a lot of the colour because most of what we see from the 1940's is black and white. They wanted to acheive the feel of what we are used to seeing from that time period, but still make it colour. So lowering the saturation works perfectly!
It also gave the series a certain 'dark' feeling to help convey what it must have been like to go through something horrific as war. Check it out (www.hbo.com/band)

Basically though, colour correction makes everything you produce, look a million times better! The image at the top of the page is a perfect example. The left side is not properly white balanced and is overexposed. Because there is still detail in his face though, the "chrominance" (colour) can easily be tweaked to give his skin a nice warm tone. The overexposure can be fixed by adjusting the luminance (black and white). First adjust the 'setup', which makes the blacks, blacker, and then raise the 'gain' which brings out your whites. Then the image has a nice contrast!

Don't be fooled though, not all images can be corrected properly. You always want to capture your image as best you can when shooting. The image below is a perfect example.



If you look closely on his forehead, there is no detail at all. The exposure from the sun is just too great for the camera to recognize any detail, so it just sees it as white. Therefore, when you try to correct it, no matter what you try and do in your colour correction tool, his forhead will remain white.

This of course can be corrected by closing the iris on your lens slightly, using a neutral desnity filter, cranking your shutter speed, or if you have a lot of time on your hand, bringing it into photoshop and correcting each frame of video individually!

So whether you be a filmmaker or photographer, remember every professional uses some type of colour correction on every piece of art they create, so you should to! You'll be amazaed at the difference!

Cheers!