Color Grading in the Cinematography as a Separate Art Form

Color grading is the altering of film, video and still images. This editing technique is more than just changing colors. It also altering contrast, shadows, exposure, and sharpening. Changing the colors affect the feeling that an audience might have. Within intensifying the color red, a desert will appear that much more scorching. Blue can be used to make a scene look colder. With further editing from the blues, a scene could even appear to have been shot at night. There are some preset filters that are seen as a form of cheating among colorists. The workflow made to look simple even though there still more work to be done.

Another name for color grading is known as color correction. These terms can be used interchangeably, however, color grading is a more inclusive term that involves several more steps to altering a film. The procedures have changed since the beginning of color in film and unto software that now changes digital frames. Whether in traditional film strips or digital footage, movies will look better and express stronger meaning with this integral process. During the times of using physical film strips, changes had to be made using chemicals. This was called color timing. The film had to spend some premeditated amount of time in a chemical bath so that the color would be developed. By the end of the 1990’s, digital video cameras began to replace film cameras. The color correcting process also became digital. O Brother Where Art Thou (2000) is the first movie to be completely edited in a digital environment.

The directors of the movie wanted a dry scenery so they decided on a monochromatic theme with different tints and shades of oranges.For editors to get the most range of colors, shadows, and midtones, the film has to have been shot in Log, which is short for Logarithm. Each camera manufacturer has their own proprietary versions of Log attached to each camera model. These Log formats are flat color profiles that purposefully looked dulled out initially. It’s up to the editor to fix the exposure, Gamma curves, and appropriate color saturation. Da Vinci is a company that has developed both hardware and software to edit quickly. Da Vinci has physical control panels to scrub through footage, along with dials and buttons that can be hotkeyed as shortcuts. This hardware can cost thousands of dollars, not to mention the software that costs a couple hundred already. Adobe Creative Cloud has two main video editing tools that can be used to make similar corrections within a different workflow. Color Theory is one of the fundamentals of creating and understanding art in its many forms. There has to be prior knowledge of using colors and conveying the right message. Not all perception of color is equal. There could be cultural barriers or old traditions that make them mean something completely different. In China, the color red is seen a symbol of luck. With Americans, green would be associated more with luck which goes back to Irish tradition. Color theory also shows what combination of colors compliments each other. That term would simply be complementary colors.

The most common dual complementary scheme involves editing orange skin tones and making almost everything a light blue or teal color. Teal and orange are so nauseating once you realize how often this scheme is overused. Some examples of these movies are Transformers, The Imitation Game, Iron Man 2, Fantastic Four, Mad Max, and Sicario. It just worsens tenfold when movie posters don’t hold back on the heavily edited contrasts of orange and teal.There are also more schemes like monochrome, trichromacy, split complementary, double split complementary, and analogous. These concepts matter in a film because there needs to be a deliberate choice to the dominant colors and the contrasting colors. A very important step is that the skin color of people should remain as natural looking as possible even with all sorts of special effects placed around them. From the early production stage of movies, there has to be a general sense of the feeling of a movie. Amélie (2001) is a French romantic comedy movie. This film uses three different colors schemes depending on the needs of the scenes. The movie breaks away from the monotony of teal and orange. It uses trichromacy of red, yellow, and green for most of the movie. When the female protagonist, Amélie, is needed to stand out, she wears a red dress with the background being the complementary color green. In one particular scene, there is a monochromatic blue. All these strong colors are rife with symbolism. Amélie is a girl with a troubled past yet remains positive in her adult years. She is in search of a lover that is represented by the heavy use of red in her wardrobe and her home decor.

Directors of photography, that are also known as cinematographers, specialize in knowing technical operations like lighting and camera equipment. Cinematographers, concept artists and film directors work together to envision whole movies or individual scenes before filming even starts. Even set designers and the wardrobe department get involved to ensure that colors don’t clash or to plan for characters to stand out on purpose. The Matrix series has three main colors will their own meaning. The four colors are a sickly green, a cool blue, a warm yellow, and plain white. The green layer hints at the actual green code of the Matrix itself, a virtual world that looks and feels imperceivable against reality. Illness is symbolized by green, especially when a person’s face is lit with this off-putting color. It works in two ways to show that something is not right in this world or reality. The blue filter intensifies the cold and mechanical scenery in the real world that has been devastated by advanced technology. In a fight scene from the first movie, Neo and Morpheus are in a fight training room separated from both realities. The distinction is highlighted by a yellow layer. In a scene of The Matrix Reloaded, Neo meets the Architect, the father of the Matrix. The majority of the scenery is white negative space. The colors of the overall scene are neutral white. Even the Architect is dressed in a light grey suit. there is no green or blue tint to again imply that this space exists outside of the previous two realities. The white character represents a “pure” being that is typical of a Christian ideology. The Matrix has several other religious undertones like Neo being equated to Jesus and other major characters that act similarly to Hindu gods (Dasa, 2012). The Architect is a personification of a computer program that was first created to control humans by understanding their emotions. A real-world figure of that accomplishment would have to be Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud, of course, is the father of psychoanalysis.

The final movie, The Matrix Revolutions ends with Neo sacrificing himself and lights up into a blindingly white light. The whole plot of The Matrix is paralleled to the “brain in the vat” philosophical thought experiment. This thought experiment is about questioning if the human mind can distinguish the real world from a made-up reality. The ending of the movie is never fully explained. Neo dies, yet the Matrix still exists, and the people in the real world are safe from the Sentinel machines. Humans are now more aware that their minds could be stuck in the virtual world but they could unplug at any time but the program is so real that they might never know the difference. An ethical dilemma for this particular video editing comes from how the result is achieved. There are LUTs, an acronym that stands for Look Up Tables, that can speed up the process of color-grading. These LUTs are like Instagram photo filters that can quickly change the look of an image.Steven Wetrich (2016) states that “the mystery and misunderstanding of LUTs seem to have led to high demand for creative LUTs and thus creating a strong marketing strategy for many small companies and colorists to sell grades and looks.” Both the people that create LUTs and the people that buy and use them are blamed for misinformation of what a LUT can actually do.

Although a LUT can help you to quickly generate a look it should not be applied so hastily and just be done with it. These visual presets do not perform any advanced tweaking for you. The individual cinematographers and small studios can charge whatever money they want for these presets and they market the LUTs as a one-click solution. Ametuer editors take this to heart and do not bother color correcting the raw files before and after applying the LUTs. Editors like these are considered lazy and it shows in their minimal amount of work that they used a popular filter on the Internet while leaving on the same settings. Even more irritating to professional is how there is an entire control panel that opens in software like the Lumetri tab in Adobe Premiere for color grading when a LUT is enabled. The point of that panel is to continue the correction of things like white balance and contrast after the LUT is activated. A possible solution to prevent the stigma of quick LUTs is for the creators of these presets to quit marketing them as the end-all product when the customers still need to tweak their videos to specifically work for them properly. There is much more for technical steps to be considered before making artistic decisions.

Audiences of movies might say that all this over-editing of the film takes away from the importance of the story. This claim is that movies have an excessive amount of image manipulation that it detracts from the story, especially in action blockbusters. In Mad Max: Fury Road, the movie is filled with image manipulated sequences. It is also an example of a movie that uses warmer yellow for the skin and makes everything else a washed out blue. What always gets pointed out is the sandstorm scene because it was so over the top. Yet people fail to realize that the movie has already been altered with the use of filtering and color gradation. The Mad Max series is set in a post-apocalyptic future of Australia where water is the most important substance. To add to the hot desert feeling, the film had an added orange tint to it. There still are differing contrasts by raising details in the shadows. During the more intimate scenes between characters, the lights inside aren't that strong. To compensate, the actors’ darkened eyes, the eyes had to be rotoscoped frame-by-frame and then the tints in the eyes had to be brightened. This kind of effect went unnoticed as being computer generated. These editing decisions did not detract from the story, but instead, it made the characters more alive and emotional to see during that scene.

The process of color grading has become an art form by itself. Similarly to how painters apply their color swatches to a canvas, colorists apply the same concept of color theory to convey feelings. The association with the meaning of these colors depends on the cultural background of the audiences. There are several steps that must be considered for the outlook of a film. Film studios hire technical and creative experts in their fields and work together from start to finish. Colorists especially must give great consideration to the aspects of aesthetics.