Editing 5 | Colour grading

The colouring process seems like an endless task. There a huge amount of tools that adobe premiere provides to adjust the colours and tones and all of these, at first, appear very complicated to use. However I began simple and then later developed the grade on each clip tweaking it till it was just right. This took around 4 hours in total to complete. Midway through the process, I captured a screen recording, Here is a time lapse to show how I coloured the video.

From watching this it is clear to see how many shots are out of place and have the wrong colours. I continued to tweak the footage till each shot looked precisely how i wanted. This involved going into great depth with the colouring. Here is a breakdown of the process.

I began by doing some colour correction. This is the process where every clip is manually tweaked to get a good exposure and balance of light. Each clip was also matched to a colour temperate which I set as a cold blueish colour. Using the built in scopes on premiere I was able to visually inspect the Waveform, vectroscope and parade levels to match each shot precisely making sure no exposures were blown out, no darks were lost and the shots looked natural. Here is a screenshot of the scopes. Although it looks complicated, knowing how to read these can make the corrections much more precise.

I then moved onto doing some colour grading this is the creative process where decisions are made to further enhance or establish a new visual tone to the project I chose a cold high contrast grade, to emulate the urban tone. Here is a before and after.

As I progressed through the grade, copy and pasting the same adjustments onto every clip doesn't mean they match up. Almost always the lighting was different. Therefore I had to match the colours on every clip. I did this through using a layer mask. This means i could select the skin tone colours and adjust only the so they still looked natural under the colour grade.

With final adjustments such as these and ensuring every shot matched. The editing process was complete. The next thing to do is to get some feedback on my video and see what can be improved before I export the video.