Color Grading - does anyone know of a Dummie's guide to color grading?

[rallymax]

Hi,
Ok I'm man enough to admit it. I suck at Color Grading.

I've read some books and hunted for online video tutorials but I can't find a basic 101 on what you do and why.

got any pointers?

thx.

[poisondeathray]

Do you mean color correction or color grading ?

[rallymax]

actually both would be great. I suck as color correction too. or should that be ?

[poisondeathray]

"Color correction" implies balancing colors and levels (like white level, black level, removing color casts), and spreading tonal range

Grading implies something more subjective - it usually done to achive a certain "look" to help tell the story or elicit a cetain mood from viewers. Often it's stylistic and a deviation from the color corrected version. eg. you might want a warm color cast for a happy sunny movie , you might want a sepia look for a nostalgic flashbask... etc...

A good book is "Color Correction For Video" by Hullfish , you can find it on Amazon.com

A whole chapter is reproduced from an AE book here (AE Visual Effects and Compositing): it has exercises an illustrates step by step approach. The controls for things like "levels" , "curves" are the same in other programs (even like photoshop, premiere), so the concepts like "gamma", or "black level" etc..., are what you should take home, even though it's on AE

http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1276351#

[rallymax]

Got any pointers on both? (I understand what they are I just don't understand the process of using the color tools to first correct the source and second grade the final output).

Any pointer as to that and things like vectorscopes (for the color corrections) would be great. I'm pretty sure that what I've self learned is dead wrong.

[poisondeathray]

That's a way too broad topic. Basically keep everything legal if you're just color correcting... Use the waveform monitor for white & black level (luminance) , and the vectorscope for hue and chroma monitoring. I know that doesn't help but the question is so vague

When you're grading, you often do "illegal" things like crush black levels , shift the hue - because it's so subjective and you're going for a certain "look"

[rallymax]

that's a good start. thx.
btw, I found this vectorscope tutorial now. it makes more sense now.
http://library.creativecow.net/articles/devis_andrew/Premiere-Pro-Vectorscope/video-tutorial