Color Grading
What Is Color Grading?
Color grading is the work of adjusting the color, contrast and tone of video or photos after capture, so that shots match each other and carry a deliberate look or mood. It follows color correction, which brings exposure and white balance to a neutral image, and many colorists treat the two as stages of one job.
Colorists grade video in DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro, and photographers grade in Lightroom. Consumer apps offer the same idea as ready-made looks with a strength slider. The comparison runs a gray ramp and three color patches through Fixie, one of the looks built into CE.SDK, which cools the shadows and warms the highlights.
What Does a Grade Change?
A grade is built from a few moves on tone and color. To see which ones finished looks use, we ran black, white, three grays and 12 colors through each of the 61 LUT filters in CE.SDK 1.84, two of which share one table. A move counts when it passes the threshold in its row. Most looks combine several moves, and 18 of the color looks leave the grays neutral, so they work on tone and color rather than adding a cast.
| What it does | Built-in looks | |
|---|---|---|
| More midtone contrast | The step from 25% to 75% gray grows by 10% or more | 38 of 61 |
| Less midtone contrast | That step shrinks by 10% or more | 7 of 61 |
| Lifted blacks | Black comes out at 4% gray or lighter, a faded look | 16 of 61 |
| Lowered whites | White comes out at 94% or darker | 18 of 61 |
| Tinted midtones | Mid gray takes on a cast of 0.02 or more in Oklab chroma | 28 of 61 |
| Split toning | Dark and light grays turn toward different hues | 11 of 61 |
| More saturation | Colors come out 10% or more saturated | 13 of 53 color looks |
| Less saturation | Colors lose 10% or more of their saturation | 21 of 53 color looks |
| Black and white or one tone | At least 85% of the color is removed | 8 of 61 |
Which Tools Make Up a Grade?
Colorists split the work into primary grading, which changes the whole frame, and secondary grading, which changes one color or area. A finished grade stacks several of these corrections.
Wheels and curves change the whole frame
Color wheels split the image into shadows, midtones and highlights, which Resolve calls lift, gamma and gain, in overlapping ranges that each get a color balance and a level. An offset control moves all three together, much as a film lab’s printer lights once did, and curves reshape tone and color in finer steps.
Qualifiers and windows change one part
A qualifier picks out colors by hue, saturation and brightness, such as one shirt or the skin in a shot, and changes only those. A power window limits a change to a soft-edged shape instead, and a tracker moves the shape with the subject so nobody has to keyframe it by hand.
A grade stacks several corrections
Each correction does one job, and they run in order: one balances the shot, another darkens the sky, a third evens out skin. A finished look can be saved and applied to other shots, or exported as a LUT for tools that only need its color.
What Do Scopes Show a Colorist?
Eyes adjust to a picture over a long session, and no two screens show color quite the same, so colorists check the signal on scopes. In one Frame.io example, a grade with lifted blacks drifted from 10 to 25 IRE over a day of judging by eye, on a scale where 0 is black and 100 is white. The picture still decides, though: a 2023 Frame.io article puts a colorist’s eyes on the reference monitor 80 to 95% of the time.
The waveform shows brightness across the frame
A waveform lays out brightness by position, so the left of the scope is the left of the image, and the brightest values sit at the top rather than the top of the frame. The RGB parade shows one waveform per channel side by side, so a color cast shows up as one channel sitting higher than the others.
The vectorscope shows hue and saturation
Hue is the angle around the circle and saturation is the distance from its center, with targets for red, green, blue, yellow, cyan and magenta. A skin tone line between the red and yellow targets marks where most skin falls, and pushing a color wheel toward a hue moves the trace the same way.
Level and gamut checks catch delivery problems
For SDR broadcast, brightness has to stay between 0 and 100 IRE, or 64 to 940 on a 10-bit scale, and very saturated reds can fail a broadcaster’s quality check. A gamut scope flags colors outside the delivery color gamut, which an HD TV would clip.
When Should You Use Which Grading Move?
Start from the job. A travel app that wants every user’s beach photos to feel like late afternoon needs one warm look on all of them, while a shirt that clashes with a brand color needs a change to that color alone.
| Use | Why | |
|---|---|---|
| Shots from two cameras don't match | Balance each shot, then match it to one reference shot before adding the look | Every shot starts from the same point, so one look lands the same way on each |
| Faces should stand out from the background | Warm skin and highlights against cooler shadows, the teal and orange look | Skin sits between red and yellow on the vectorscope, and teal lies roughly opposite |
| A faded, older look | Lift the blacks and lower the whites, often with less saturation | With no true black or white, the tonal range shrinks. CE.SDK's Oldtimer sets black at 22% gray and mutes color by 23% |
| Change one color only, such as a shirt | A qualifier on that hue | A primary change moves every color in the frame |
| Darken or brighten one area, such as the sky | A power window, tracked if the camera moves | The change stays inside a soft-edged shape that follows the subject |
| One look on every clip or photo | Copy the grade, group the shots or save it as a look | Grades redone by hand drift apart, while a group shares one |
How Color Grading Works in CE.SDK
Your users get two grading tools, adjustments and LUT filters, and both work on photos and video clips in CE.SDK. Which route fits depends on whether the look is tuned by hand, picked from a set or fixed by your brand.
Tune the grade with adjustments
When a look is built by hand for each image or clip, your users open the adjustments panel. Temperature sets a warm or cool cast. Contrast, highlights and shadows shape the tone, and the blacks and whites controls move the darkest and brightest pixels. Saturation sets how strong colors are, and clarity adds contrast in the midtones. The same adjustments work on images and on video clips.
Pick a ready-made look from the filters
When the same look should land on many images, a LUT filter applies it in one step. CE.SDK 1.84 ships 61 of them in its web asset library, from black and white to split-tone looks such as Fixie. Your users set each one’s intensity from 0 to 1 for a light or full grade. Looks your team made in a grading tool can join the set as custom LUT filters.
Lock a brand grade in templates
When every user’s output has to match one brand look, set the grade in the template and turn off the editing permissions for filters and adjustments on those blocks, so end users can’t change it. Batch processing applies the same edits to many files at once, and an effect can be switched off without removing it, which gives you a quick before and after view.
FAQs
No. Photographers grade too, and in October 2020 Adobe replaced the Split Toning panel in Lightroom Classic 10 with a Color Grading panel. Its wheels cover shadows, midtones and highlights, plus a global wheel, with Blending and Balance sliders that set how far the three tints overlap and where the shadows end. CE.SDK applies its adjustments and LUT filters to photos and video clips alike.
It sets warm, orange-leaning skin and highlights against cool, teal shadows and backgrounds, and grading tutorials for photos and video use it as their standard example. Skin falls along the skin tone line on a vectorscope and teal lies roughly opposite, so cooling everything around a face separates it from the background. Of the 61 LUT filters built into CE.SDK, 3 push shadows cool and highlights warm, and Fixie also warms skin and moves sky toward teal.
Screens differ in brightness, color range and settings, which is why colorists grade in a dim room on a calibrated display. HD video in standard dynamic range targets Rec.709, while HDR video follows ITU-R BT.2100 with the PQ or HLG transfer function, and a device that can't show HDR tone-maps it down. The SDR and HDR versions therefore need separate checks, and an HDR file only plays as HDR when it is tagged with its color space and transfer function.
No. Log footage keeps more of the brightness range the camera captured, which leaves room for the grade, but it looks flat and gray until it is converted for a display, for example to Rec.709. That conversion is a technical step before any look. Color-managed pipelines such as ACES handle it with an input transform and grade in ACEScct, the log encoding ACES defines for grading.
Not quite. A grade covers every color decision on a project, from balancing and matching each shot to changing a single color or area, as well as the overall look. A LUT is one fixed table of color changes, so it can carry the overall look into another app, but not the work done shot by shot.
Film labs graded, or timed, each scene by setting its red, green and blue printer lights in steps called printer points, and every change applied to the whole frame. Scanning the film and grading it digitally made it possible to change one color or area. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) was the first major Hollywood feature graded entirely through a digital intermediate, which turned the green foliage of its Mississippi summer brown and yellow.
Links
Documentation and references for this concept.
Video Editor SDK
Bring color adjustments and LUTs to the clips your users edit in your app.
Adjust Colors
Set temperature, contrast, blacks, whites and the other color adjustments.
Apply Filters and Effects
Add LUT filters to images and video clips and set their intensity.
Related Terms
LUT
A table that maps each input color to an output color, used to convert log footage to a display standard or to give imag…
Effects
Visual processing layers applied on top of a block's fill to modify its appearance, including LUT-based color filters, a…
Video Editor
A CE.SDK Starter Kit for timeline-based video creation and editing, surfacing clip trimming, splitting, reordering, and …
Photo Editor
A CE.SDK Starter Kit focused on single-image editing, initializing with an image filling the page and surfacing tools fo…