Colour grade 1

1.1

In this grade, I wanted to create a clear contact between the wooden walls and the black electronic speakers and TV. For this effect, I over exposed the image to give it more light, from there I decreased the contrast to darken the wools to create a sense of realism. I then increase the whites and decreased the black by 69 and 79 respectively. This put emphasis on both colours. I chose not to alter the colour of the shadows, midtones or highlights.

1.2

In the second grade I wanted to create a moodier tone. I altered the white balance into cooler tone. From there I lowered the contrast and highlights until it created a realistic blueish hue. I had to raise the whites in the grade to ensure it wasn’t too dark. I also made the shadows, midtones and highlights all slightly bluer to enhance this effect. It kinda looked like a low quality horror movie from the early 2000s.

1.2/5

Hue saturation curves/ RGB curves are a lot of fun.

1.3

In my last shot I wanted to make the walls pop. For this I used a higher temperature balance, from there I raised the exposure, contrast and lowered the shadows and blacks. I then made all the tones slightly redder. These changed changed the intensity of the shot whilst also giving it a darker tone/vibe.

Colour grade 2

2.1

In this grade, I wanted to emphasis on the green bottle, I tried to put a mask around the bottle and adjust it’s contrast, temp and tones. Weirdly, my laptop (1 year old macbook air…) took around 15 minutes per mask and I the only time it worked, I couldn’t adjust the colour.  I created this effect by boosting the contrast and lowering the black. This really made Josh stand out, but also kind’ve made him like 2D. It also came out blurry  because I was messing around with the saturation and the sharpen features.

2.2

In my second attempt to make the bottle pop. I experimented with the curves to try and make the bottle more green. Instead this created a hazy effect. From there I under exposed the shot and lowered the shadows and black, to try and make at least put focus on Josh.

2.3

In this edit, I hardly changed any of the correction settings, I only increased the contrast by 90 and lowered the black and highlights. Instead I tried to make the bottle pop but change the colour wheels. After some experimenting, I had the shadows and midtones on the edge of the middle and the blue section and made the highlights green. This was probably my best attempt at making the bottle pop.

Colour Grade 3

1.1

I chose this frame, because I wanted to explore what I could do with the incandescent light coming from my bike light. In this grade, I found that altering the correction settings were too drastic in changing what the light looked like. Instead I opted for give it a slight pinkish hie by altering the highlights and midtones.

1.2

For my second grade, I wanted to try and make everything green except the light. I achieved this by altering all the tints to be verging on green, from there I lowered the saturation and gave it a pink highlight tine, which gave the light a pink hue.

1.3

I played around with the creative tab for my last grade. I found it really interesting how I could make the light look bigger or smaller by just altering the tint balance. This turned out to probably be my favourite of all the grade. I thought that despite that the cool purple hue mixed with the warm light coming from the side of the best really transitioned well.

Overall I found the practice of experimenting with colour grading enjoyable but ultimately unsatisfying. My inability to get the mask feature working properly mixed with my computer being annoyingly slow meant that by the end of the activity, I felt like I wasted too much time experimenting on altering the tone and temperature on shots and not on specific details which is the most important aspect of colour grading.

I am going to give this another crack for the next initiative post.