How To Quickly Generate Color Correction Ideas

Day 6: 25 Insights in 25 Days New Year Marathon

Learn How to ‘Think Like a Colorist’ At The Start of a Session

Watching Dan Moran’s ‘How to Think Like a Colorist’ series got me thinking about the steps I go through at the start of a session. What do I do in the first moments of a color grade? How do I cycle through the various tools in my software and figure out the ones I want to use? How do I quickly generate color correction ideas for presentation to my client?

In this Insight, learn my process for starting a new project

The key at the start of a session is to quickly iterate. Our goal is to find the edges of a client’s taste. What do they like? What do they hate? And often, finding what they hate gets you moving much more quickly.

You can follow along with this video Insight since I’m using the same footage Dan used in his Forest Scene Insight (the direct link to the footage is here, on Red’s website).

Of course, this workflow can be adapted to color correcting in non-linear editors.

If you have several different color correction plug-ins then follow this same technique for cycling through them (perhaps saving each version on an upper track that you can toggle on and off for quick comparisons).

Enjoy!

-pi