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Confused by colour grading? Watch this complete guide to the basic concepts and tools

Dealing with colour in video is a two-part process. First, you’ve got colour correction. This is the process where you tweak your footage to get things as accurate to real life as you can. It’s also used to match footage shot with multiple cameras to give them all the same standard starting point for the second part of the process, which is colour grading. This is giving the footage your own creative aesthetic spin.

We grade to impart mood or feeling into our sequences. It’s a visual aid to help guide the viewer and put them in the mindset we want them to have while watching. And sometimes it’s just because they look cool. Whatever you’re reasons for doing it, if you’ve never done it before, it can feel a little intimidating, so the guys at Film Riot put together this “Color Grading 101” video to teach you all of the basic concepts of grading.

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How to colour grade nighttime footage quickly in Adobe Premiere Pro

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Colour grading nighttime footage can be difficult. You’ve often got a lot of contrast to deal with, particularly when light sources appear in your shot and the camera often doesn’t see the muted nighttime colours (or the bright lights!) the same way we do with our eyes. While there are a lot of great in-depth tutorials out there for serious colour grading, sometimes you just need a “quick fix”.

In this video, Stephen from Stephen and Janaka walks us through a quick colour grading process for nighttime footage in Adobe Premiere Pro that literally only takes a couple of minutes to apply.

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This color grading web app copies colors from one photo to another in seconds

If you want to transfer the color palette or color grading style from one photo to another, you can do it in Photoshop. Or, you can just import the source and target photo, click a button and have it done for you. Enter Image Colour Transfer, a web app that lets you do exactly that. By inserting two photos and clicking a button, you can have your image color graded with a specific style in just a few seconds. I played with it a little to show you the results, and while not all of them are perfect, I can see the potential.

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How to use Lightroom CC’s Color Grading feature to get the most out of your raw files

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Lightroom started to overhaul its Lightroom CC UI in around October 2020, switching the old split toning feature into a new Color Grading feature with more video editing style colour wheels rather than basic sliders and a standard colour picker. But it’s a feature that still confuses some Lightroom users who have only ever dealt with the previous split toning feature and have never worked with video before.

The Colour Grading feature does the same thing that the Split Toning tool did, except it lets you do a lot more, too, and it lets you do it a bit more intuitively. In this video, Kevin Raposo walks us through the settings and details of the Color Grading feature to show us how the feature works and how we can use it to enhance and improve our images.

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How to use Photoshop’s Channel Mixer to colour grade your images

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There are a lot of ways to colour tone and grade your photos in Photoshop and although I primarily use Curves to colour tone my shots, a powerful tool that I’m starting to use more and more is the somewhat under-utilised Channel Mixer.

Every couple of weeks I Live Stream via my Facebook Page and there I colour tone images submitted by my community. During the streams we often discuss techniques and lighting for a couple of hours and it’s a great place to get some free feedback and critique on your shots. Those that have watched me live in the past will have seen me use the Channel Mixer a lot, but for those that have missed the streams, I thought I’d do a super quick intro to the extremely powerful ‘Channel Mixer’ Photoshop adjustment layer, to show you some popular looks that take seconds to add to your shot.

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fylm.ai is an AI-powered web-based colour grading platform for both video and photos

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The company that brought us lutify.me has launched a new online AI-powered colour grading platform called fylm.ai. It’s a web-based colour grading solution that’s completely platform-independent and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux from within your web browser. There’s nothing to download or install, no plugins and you’re always seeing the latest version of the app.

It works for both stills and video and as well as providing all of the colour grading features you might already be used to, it offers colour matching and extraction, print film emulation and tools to let you share and collaborate in teams remotely. According to their website, it’s already in use by companies such as Netflix, Prime Video and the BBC.

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Follow these eight tips for stunning colors in your photos

Whether it emphasizes the subject or is a subject itself, color is a powerful ally in creating a striking image. In this video, Jamie Windsor gives you eight tips that will help you master the use of color in your photos. He supports each of them with a set of wonderful examples, so take a look, take notes, and enjoy.

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Colour grading black & white images in Lightroom is apparently a thing – Here’s how to do it

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This kind of struck me as a little bit weird at first. Mostly because it was something I’d never even considered. Toning, sure, but split toning the shadows and highlights separately on a black and white image that doesn’t actually have any native colour whatsoever? Yeah, kinda weird. But the more I watched this video from photographer Anthony Morganti, the more it intrigued me.

It’s an interesting idea, to add colour to a black & white image – and not in the colourising sense, but doing the same kind of shadow and highlight tints we might typically do to a colour image or video sequence. For stills, though, in Lightroom, it’s pretty easy to do, too.

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We have tested lightroom’s new color grading tool – here is what we think

In Lightroom’s newest iteration, Adobe has replaced the split toning tool with a brand new color grading tool. It is not only videographers who will benefit from a new and powerful color grading tool; it’s helpful for photographers. Landscape photographers have, for example, extensively use split toning to warm up highlights and add colder tones to the shadows.

I want to share a brief explanation of the various options the tool offers + reveal some hidden panels. I’ll also look at how hotkeys provide full control of the center points and knobs outside the color circles.

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Watch: All you wanted to know about color theory and color grading

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Understanding color is one of the crucial things to understand, no matter if you’re a photographer or a video creator. Understanding color theory and psychology will help you add more meaning and impact to your work. So, if you’d like to master the use of color, Joanna Kustra has an amazing video for you.

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