Colour and the picture

The "cinematic" filter, orange skin, a sky the colour of a highlighter. Colour gets ruined in the edit more often than it gets improved, even though basic colour work takes two minutes and makes a video look noticeably more expensive. Here are those two minutes.

Correction and grading

These are two different jobs, and confusing them is costly.

Colour correction: fix what's wrong. Brighten a dark shot, bring yellow skin back to normal, add contrast to a washed-out clip. The goal is a picture that looks like real life.

Colour grading: add a mood. Cool shadows, warm light, muted colours. That's taste and style, and it comes after correction, not instead of it.

Nearly every video needs only correction. Grading matters when you have a deliberate style and hold it from video to video.

The order

Any editor has lots of sliders, and moving them in random order means going in circles. Here's the order.

Exposure. Overall brightness first. The face should read clearly: visible skin texture, no sinking into shadow, no white patches. If the editor shows a histogram, the graph shouldn't pile up against the right edge or the left one.

White balance. Set it by something you know is white or grey: a wall, a T-shirt, a sheet of paper in the shot. Then look at the skin: it should look alive, neither yellow nor blue. Skin is the check, not the reference. Yellow, push towards blue. Bluish, push towards yellow.

Contrast. Add a little so the picture stops looking flat. A little, not until the shadows go black.

Saturation. Last, and carefully. A few per cent, no more. If there's a separate "vibrance" slider, it's safer for skin: it lifts dull colours and mostly leaves faces alone. Saturation cranked to the top is one of the surest signs of amateur editing.

Tip. After correcting, open the video on your phone at medium screen brightness, not on the editor's monitor. That's what the viewer will see.

Matching every shot

The most visible mistake: shots in one video with different colours. The medium shot is warm, the close-up is cool, the B-roll is darker than both. People who've never heard the words "colour correction" still notice. Brands do send videos back with a single note like "why are you a different colour in the middle?": the phone's auto white balance shifted between takes and nobody spotted it.

The fix: pick one shot as the reference, ideally the one where the face looks right, and match the others to it. Most editors let you copy colour settings from one clip and paste them onto the rest, then fine-tune the differences.

Checking is easy: put shots side by side or flick quickly between them. Colour differences jump out.

One special case: HDR. If you shot in HDR, convert the clips to SDR before correcting, or the colour in the feed won't match what you saw in the editor.

Presets and filters

A ready-made filter is someone else's correction made for someone else's shot. Sometimes it lands, mostly it doesn't. The main casualty is skin: it goes orange, grey or plastic.

If you want to use a filter, apply it after your own correction and at half strength. Almost every editor has an intensity slider. One hundred per cent is almost always too much.

LUTs, the colour tables you download, are the same story: built for a specific shooting profile. On phone footage shot by a window they give random results.

Mistake. Putting one filter on every shot and assuming they now match. A filter adds the same thing to different sources, and the difference between them stays.

Zooming and sharpness

Zooming in the editor hurts the picture just like bad colour does, so here is the limit, briefly. Vertical 4K in a 1080p project can be zoomed two times at most, comfortably 1.5 to 1.7: beyond that it goes soft. Horizontal 4K in a vertical project gives you less headroom, because the height is only 2160 pixels. Shot in 1080p, project in 1080p: there's no headroom, and ten to fifteen per cent is about as far as you can go.

Do this now

• Take one shot and go through the four steps in order: exposure, white balance, contrast, saturation. Touch nothing else.
• Copy those settings onto the other shots in the video and flick between them until the colour matches.
• Apply your favourite filter at one hundred per cent and at fifty. Compare the skin.