Color Correction in Video Editing: Everything You Need To Know

No amount of production planning can allow us to capture real life in a way that perfectly aligns with our vision. Often, post-production efforts are necessary for correcting visual imperfections, such as color imbalances, poor contrast, and tonal inaccuracies. If you want to ensure a visually cohesive output, including color correction in your post-production process is imperative.

What is color correction?

Color correction is the technical post-production process of digitally altering video clips to ensure continuity and accuracy in coloring across clips in a video project. It involves adjusting exposure, contrast, color balance, and other elements to match how the human eye would perceive a series of scenes in real life.

A few key components of color correction include:

• Exposure: The amount of light captured in an image. Overexposed images have too much light, while underexposed images are too dark. 
• Contrast: The amount of differentiation between shades in an image. High-contrast images display more colors or shades than low-contrast images. 
• Color Balance: The differences in how intense individual colors appear. Color correction usually balances white balance to neutralize the image’s overall hue. 
• Saturation: The vividness of colors in an image. Saturated colors tend to pop out, while desaturated colors fall closer to white and gray. 

Color correction vs color grading

Color correction is about applying necessary adjustments to ensure visual uniformity across clips. Meanwhile, color grading is about manipulating colors to achieve a desired mood, tone, or style. 

Let’s say you shot a commercial at two different times of day: one take in the afternoon and another closer to sunset. However, the narrative of your commercial takes place in the early afternoon. 

Color correction would involve adjusting the white balance of the sunset shot to neutralize its golden cast. The process tricks your audience into believing both shots occurred within the same hour. 

Color grading, on the other hand, adds further stylization. For example, if you wanted your commercial to evoke a sense of gloom and coldness, you could apply a blue cast over your clips.

Color correction should always occur before color grading. This order simplifies the process and ensures visual cohesion. Rather than doing guesswork to achieve uniform stylization among disparate clips, you normalize all raw footage according to a determined baseline, then apply your preferred color grading settings. 

How to do color correction in video editing

While there are no explicit rules for color correction, you can simplify the process by approaching the different components in a specific order. Below are the general guidelines for color correction in video editing. 

Step 1: Select a Baseline Image

Select an image to determine a baseline look. You will adjust this image’s exposure, white balance, and contrast to create a reference for future color correction edits. Once you set a standard for normal, you can apply similar settings to the rest of your clips.

Step 2: Adjust Exposure

Exposure is one of the first things you should tackle in the color correction process. As mentioned, exposure refers to the amount of light a camera captures. If your footage displays too much or too little light, the viewer will have difficulty identifying the individual colors present. 

Note that as much as possible, you’ll want to ensure that you capture the correct amount of light on the first go. This is because images captured at low exposure tend to appear grainy when edited to become brighter. Correcting exposure at the post-production stage should be a last resort to ensure cohesiveness among clips. 

Step 3: Set White Balance

Once exposure corrections allow you to properly view the colors in a frame, it’s time to set a white balance. Bringing the white parts of the image closer to true white ensures that all other colors take on a neutral hue. This ensures your footage appears on screen as it would to the human eye in the real world.

Most color correction software offers automated color correction tools. After you select a reference point that should be white, the tool will automatically adjust the frame’s tint and temperature to bring all whites closer to true white. You can also play around with color balance to ensure that the colors don’t skew toward an individual tint or hue. 

Step 4: Fix Contrast

After ensuring that all colors are sufficiently visible and neutralized, determine how detailed you want the image to appear. Lower the contrast to achieve lower variation between the individual shades in your image, or raise it to achieve more detail. Like with white balance, the goal of correcting contrast is to bring an image closer to how it appears to the human eye in the real world. 

Step 5: Modify Saturation

The last step in editing your reference image is making saturation adjustments. Try to make your footage look as natural as possible. Desaturated images tend to look dull, while oversaturated images look overly intense. 

You can play around with stylized saturation once you get to the color-grading stage, but sticking to the natural look is best when still in the color-correction phase. Seeing what your footage looks like while neutral and natural ensures that it will read well to the human eye. 

Step 6: Repeat Steps on Remaining Clips

Once you’re satisfied with the look of your baseline clip, use the result as a reference for the remaining clips. The individual settings will be easier to determine now that you’ve set the standard for what a clip should look like. Apply similar settings and tweak as necessary to ensure cohesion across clips. 

Step 7: Apply Additional Color Corrections

You might not get everything perfectly on the first go. Sometimes, individual colors might appear washed out or inconsistent after the initial color correction process. Now that your clips are more or less cohesive, it helps to play around with hue, saturation, and color balance to bring about your desired effect. 

Color correction best practices

Color correction tends to be a long process. However, there are many practices you can implement to increase efficiency and streamline your workflow. Below are a few examples. 

Shoot the correct exposure at the production stage

Exposure is one of the hardest things to correct at the post-production stage. When you capture too much or too little light, the image’s unique details get lost. While some details can still be salvaged through color correction, overly adjusted images tend to look grainy.

You should plan for lighting at the production stage. Ensure that your camera settings let in the right amount of light for the setting you plan to capture. Additionally, ensure that your lighting adequately highlights the desired details of your subject and setting. Check out our guide to three-point lighting for tips on creating lighting setups that emphasize visuals. 

Use scopes for consistency

Scopes are graphical representations of the colors in an image. You can use scopes to compare the brightness and saturation of two differing clips more easily. 

In DaVinci Resolve, for example, there are two commonly used types of scopes: the vectorscope and the waveform.

[ Insert Image: https://www.shutterstock.com/shutterstock/videos/1096866641/thumb/1.jpg 

Caption: Example of a Vectorscope ]

The vectorscope is a circular graph that visualizes the levels of saturation of different colors in an image. The colors in the circle represent the colors in the image, while the circle measures the saturation level. The further a color stretches from the circle, the more saturated it appears.

[ Insert Image: https://www.shutterstock.com/shutterstock/videos/1098100505/thumb/1.jpg?ip=x480 ] 

Meanwhile, a waveform represents the distribution of brightness across an image. High wave crests represent the bright parts of the image, while low wave troughs represent the dark parts of the image. 

Should a part wave exceed the graph’s height, the corresponding part of the image will lose out on detail. A crest that is too high represents a part of the image that is too bright to display detail, while a trough that is too low represents a part of the image that is too dark to display detail.

You can use scopes to achieve visual cohesion more easily. With graphs, you can visualize objective consistencies between coloring settings instead of eyeballing similarities and differences. 

Leverage Automated Tools

Programs like DaVinci Resolve offer color correction tools that automatically apply adjustments based on your footage’s midtones, highlights, and shadows. Some also automatically match your color settings to your desired reference clips.

Although these tools are not perfect, they can be helpful if you need to save time. You can use these auto-correction tools as a base, and then add tweaks based on your personal preferences and needs. 

Best color correction tools

If you want to try your hand at color correction, there are many tools available. Some come built-in with video editing software, while others supplement your workflow. Below are our choices for the top color correction tools for video editing. 

DaVinci Resolve

In our list of the best video editing software, we named DaVinci Resolve as the best software in today’s market. Among its biggest selling points are its powerful color grading and color correction tool, which come with the software free of charge.

DaVinci Resolve started as a color correction program, then added video editing features when demand grew. Naturally, the company’s decades of experience in developing their color correction tools led to a polished and comprehensive final product. No other video editing software matches DaVinci Resolve’s level of built-in color customization. 

Features included under DaVinci resolve include:

• Primary color wheels for highlight, shadow, and mid-tone balancing
• Auto-balancing for contrast and colors
• Preset color-correction filters
• Multi-clip color correction

ColorDirector

ColorDirector is a color grading and correction program for Windows users. It’s an excellent alternative for video editors who need color correction support but prefer other software over DaVinci Resolve. Programs like CapCut and Canva, for example, lack the depth of color correction settings that DaVinci Resolve offers.

As a dedicated color grading and correction software, ColorDirector offers a wide range of easy-to-use tools that allow beginners to learn the process. Examples include:

• Color wheels and sliders for highlight, shadow, and mid-tone balancing
• Automatic color matching
• Selective color editing
• Comprehensive lighting editing

Adobe Premiere Pro

While Adobe Premiere Pro isn’t the color management powerhouse that DaVinci Resolve is, it still offers useful color correction tools for video editing. Because the program is designed to be user-friendly, the learning curve is easier to navigate than DaVinci Resolve. 

Adobe Premiere Pro’s color correction tool, called the Lumetri Color Panel, offers most of DaVinci Resolve’s core color correction features but with less control. DaVinci Resolve is the objectively better program if you want the ability to adjust even the most minute details, but Adobe Premiere Pro should suffice for basic projects.

Color correction features included in Adobe Premiere Pro are:

• Panels for white balance and skin tone corrections
• Color wheels for highlights, shadows, and midtones
• Instant, one-click corrections
• Color presets
• Color matching tools

Conclusion

Color correction plays a crucial role in the post-production process. It helps you create a polished and cohesive final product, which translates to increased credibility among audiences. Effective color correction gives your videos the veneer of professionalism that potential customers seek from brands.  

Elevate your brand’s visual storytelling

Although color correction is a necessary part of the video production process, it can be difficult to learn and master. If you need assistance elevating your brand’s visual identity, outsource video production services to SplitMotion. Our experts take care of every step in the video production process, from storyboarding to video production and editing.

We’ll turn your vision into a story that sells. Refer to our services page for more information. 

FAQs

Is color correction necessary?

Even if you film with the correct camera settings and production conditions, you might still encounter incongruencies between your captured footage and your ideal vision for your video. Color correction helps you address these imperfections and ensure that your video reads well to the human eye. 

How do you know if your video needs color correction?

The most glaring sign that a video needs color correction is if the clips seem to lack continuity. Inconsistencies between brightness, saturation, color balance, and other visual aspects make the footage appear disjointed. Color correction creates visual consistency across clips, ensuring the human eye reads the final product as cohesive and believable. 

What is the difference between color correction and color grading?

Color correction is a technical process, while color grading is a creative one. Color correction makes tweaks to ensure visual cohesiveness and accuracy, while color grading applies stylistic choices to evoke a desired mood, atmosphere, or message.