Understanding the Basics of Cinematic Color Grading

Color grading helps curate a film’s color palette, conveying a specific atmosphere, style, and emotion. In short, it's essential for communicating your film's story.

Read on to learn more about why cinematic color grading is important, key examples, and how you can emulate the professional colorists of big-budget blockbusters.

Why use color grading?

Colors elicit emotions—they have a psychological impact on the audience. As Jet Omoshebi perfectly framed it, the role of a colorist is acting as “a translator between the filmmakers and their audience — to make sure no message is lost.”

Let’s take a look at a couple of examples below. 

Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Throughout the film, different colors convey key messages.

Whenever the main protagonist (K, played by Ryan Gosling) passes through a key plot point or twist, the color grade is overwhelmingly yellow, conveying information and enlightenment. The whole of the Wallace Headquarters scene is yellow, subconsciously signaling that this is an important place with key information inhabited by important people.

Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Wes Anderson’s color grades have become a signature of his unique aesthetic style. With each of his films, there’s a real sense that they are works of art, none more so than The Grand Budapest Hotel. 

His use of vibrant reds, purples, pinks, whites, oranges, yellows, and browns throughout the hotel (particularly during the 1932 timeline scenes) conveys the hotel in all its fantastical glory. The element of eccentricity in the grade matches the quirky, whacky story.

Types of color grading in film

There are lots of different types of color grades and color palettes. These are some of the most common.

Teal and Orange

Because these colors are opposites, they look good together and contrast well. Blues and teals are for shadows, while oranges and yellows are highlights. Quite often, skin tones are more orange, so they stand out against blue shadows, drawing attention to subjects.

Monochromes

Monochromes are built around tones, working with saturation to create very striking images with dominant primary colors. Cinematographers use these dominant colors to convey key messages, as already discussed with Blade Runner 2049. There are plenty of other great examples out there.

Bleach Bypass

In direct contrast to monochromes, the bleach bypass color grade is desaturated. It’s often used to reflect desperate, hopeless worlds and stories. 

Color grading tips

White balance

To help with color grading, we always recommend white balancing each of your scenes before you shoot. If you let a camera auto-white balance, there’s a chance the temperatures may be way off between different clips, creating more work for yourself when color correcting and grading.

Underexposed footage

Shooting slightly underexposed is always going to help. You can always increase the exposure of this footage, but an overexposed image with blown-out highlights is irretrievable.

Noise correction

Unwanted noise can be cleaned up with various post-production software, but it’s best to avoid it by shooting in good lighting at a lower ISO. Unless, of course, you’re purposefully going for a “grainy” style.

Read more about color grading—essential steps, software, and more—on the Filmsupply blog.