Pro Tips To Improve Your Colour Grading

Today’s #ColorGrading tip: Underexposed footage has quite some ugly color noise going on. Desaturating the shadows can help.

— Phil Strahl ??? (@PhilStrahl) December 31, 2014

Phil Strahl is the in-house colorist at Red Bull’s Media House, and among other things, a prolific tweeter of excellent tips for other colorists to benefit from.

What’s particularly great about Phil’s tips is that they tend to focus on the art and style of colour grading, rather than simply the technical or software side, and often are about solving common colorist problems.

Here is a round up of the best of Phil, but for more, you can follow him on @philstrahl.

Today’s #ColorGrading tip: If you can’t tell what’s wrong with a shot, pump up the saturation. That will usually tell you.

— Phil Strahl ??? (@PhilStrahl) December 23, 2014

Today’s #ColorGrading tip: Too many different colors make a shot look busy. Focus on three or less and desaturate the others instead.

— Phil Strahl ??? (@PhilStrahl) December 30, 2014

Today’s #ColorGrading tip: Using custom Beziér-masks instead of default circles/rectangles makes them feel more natural.

— Phil Strahl ??? (@PhilStrahl) January 7, 2015

Today’s #ColorGrading tip: Identify and mind where the key light is coming from and don’t work against it.

— Phil Strahl ??? (@PhilStrahl) January 13, 2015

Today’s #ColorGrading tip: Check your work at thumbnail size. If you still can make out what’s going on, you’re doing it right.

— Phil Strahl ??? (@PhilStrahl) January 15, 2015

Today’s #ColorGrading tip: Avoid relying on too many HSL key masks especially on noisy or artifact-riddled footage.

— Phil Strahl ??? (@PhilStrahl) January 6, 2015

Today’s #ColorGrading tip: Give clouds in the sky more depth by lowering their gamma, but keeping the highlight level.

— Phil Strahl ??? (@PhilStrahl) January 19, 2015

Today’s #ColorGrading tip: Blue appears darker equally saturated than green or red, so darken the others or desaturate and lift the blues.

— Phil Strahl ??? (@PhilStrahl) February 3, 2015

Today’s #ColorGrading tip: When grading beauty shots of food & edibles, completely desaturate any blue shadows. Makes it look more tasty.

— Phil Strahl ??? (@PhilStrahl) January 22, 2015

Today’s #ColorGrading tip: Fine red details are prone to get lost in MPEG/H.26x encoding. Instead of more sat, just make them brighter.

— Phil Strahl ??? (@PhilStrahl) January 23, 2015

Today’s #ColorGrading tip: You can get rid of color noise in the YUV/LAB color space by gently blurring only the UV/AB channels.

— Phil Strahl ??? (@PhilStrahl) January 20, 2015

Today’s #ColorGrading tip: When temporal denoise on 4K+ raw footage kills your GPU, try to denoise in the RAW's clip’s settings (Resolve)

— Phil Strahl ??? (@PhilStrahl) January 30, 2015

Today’s #ColorGrading tip: If you can't afford temporal noise reduction, try desat deep shadows and blur their U & V channels slightly.

— Phil Strahl ??? (@PhilStrahl) February 4, 2015

Today’s #ColorGrading tip: Don't equalize skin tones too much. Every person is different so keep the diversity (unless you grade the Borg)

— Phil Strahl ??? (@PhilStrahl) January 21, 2015

Today’s #ColorGrading tip: You can usually get away with pretty wild gradings if you keep deep shadows and highlights desaturated.

— Phil Strahl ??? (@PhilStrahl) December 19, 2014

Today’s #ColorGrading tip: Don’t always use the full dynamic. Esp. scenes at dusk or in fog don’t need sharp highlights.

— Phil Strahl ??? (@PhilStrahl) January 26, 2015

Today’s #ColorGrading tip: A vignette that lifts gamma & shadows is a good fix for bad lenses with unwanted vignetting at low f-stops.

— Phil Strahl ??? (@PhilStrahl) February 13, 2015

Today’s #ColorGrading tip: Contrast, Movement, Color, Resolution (in this order) is how we humans perceive visual information.

— Phil Strahl ??? (@PhilStrahl) January 28, 2015

Today’s #ColorGrading tip: When a vignette is noticeable, it’s too much.

— Phil Strahl ??? (@PhilStrahl) December 24, 2014

Today’s #ColorGrading tip: Don’t fiddle too much with details, instead find and emphasize the story of the shot and who/what it is about.

— Phil Strahl ??? (@PhilStrahl) February 9, 2015

Today’s #ColorGrading tip: The color of shadows on snow usually is the same color as the sky. If it’s grey, so are the shadows.

— Phil Strahl ??? (@PhilStrahl) February 5, 2015

Even More Colour Grading Tweet Tips

#Resolve Tip—Select multiple folders in the Media Pool folder list to expose all of their contents in the Media Pool browser at once.

— Alexis Van Hurkman (@hurkman) December 2, 2014

If you want even more Twitter based tips for the knowledge hungry colorist, then you should definitely check out this previous post which has an even longer list of tips from Colorist, author and trainer Alexis Van Hurkman. And check out the rest below. Obviously all of these colorists are well worth following on Twitter.

The most valuable skill you can have as a colorist is knowing when your eyes have turned to mush.

— Juan Salvo (@j_salvo) February 12, 2015

@jonnyelwyn One of my tips; when grading day for night, retain some specular highlights and darken the rest. More natural looking

— Jamie Dickinson (@dickij10) February 12, 2015

One cannot have too many 'scope views. pic.twitter.com/qstdgCpUes

— Josh Petok (@joshpetok) December 23, 2014

Colorist tip. Don't let your clients get hungry and limit the times they are offered espresso.

— Dave Hussey (@Davehussey) January 28, 2015

When tracking a window to a face, be careful if they turn to profile. Window easily becomes visible. #colorgraders #colortip

— Rob Bessette (@robsbessette) January 13, 2015

Keyframe as they turn and either move the window onto the face or remove the window grade to avoid a haloing effect #colorgraders #colortip

— Rob Bessette (@robsbessette) January 13, 2015

Osiris vision 6 LUT used on new discovery series. @VisionColorPS @FilmLight #chaoscaughtoncamera #postproduction pic.twitter.com/o4Iz0GiAFv

— Adam_Splice (@adam_splice) November 28, 2014

Happy to have you, so glad ur enjoying it! RT @_Richie_Gray: In color at @light_iron. Love it here. #SugarMountain pic.twitter.com/YdxBcbllN9

— Light Iron (@light_iron) January 20, 2015