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What is Color Grading?

Color grading intentionally shapes color, contrast, and tone to establish a visual mood or consistent aesthetic. It usually follows technical color correction and may depend on a defined display target.

How Color Grading works

Grading is the controlled creative transformation of corrected images into a chosen appearance, often through primary adjustments, selective keys, windows, curves, and lookup tables. The work is evaluated through a color-managed path that connects camera or working space to the reference display. A grade may be stored as instructions or baked into rendered pixels, with different consequences for later revisions. It belongs near finishing, before delivery encodes and after editorial decisions are stable.

Key facts

  1. A 3D lookup table maps combinations of input color channels and can express cross-channel changes, but it cannot represent every grading operation, such as tracked masks or spatial corrections.
  2. Display-referred and scene-referred grades behave differently when reused for another dynamic range; direct reuse without the intended transform can alter contrast and saturation.
  3. Review proxies are reliable for approval only when they carry or bake the same color-management intent; untagged playback paths can make an unchanged grade appear different.

When Color Grading matters

Preserve grading metadata and the intended color space when building transcoding, HDR, or review workflows. Converting without suitable tone or gamut mapping can make approved footage appear washed out or clipped.

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