BEFORE: (First Still)

This is the initial still of the clip I was attempting to colour grade. Through colour grading I was hoping to fix the warmth of the clip.

1. I attempted to neutralise this warmth with the white balance tool of the Lumetri colour panel, I then did some manual adjustment to get the red, green and blue colours of the RGB parade scope as even as possible.

2. I noticed the still was slightly faded looking, so I increased the saturation.

3. Finally, I increased the shadows level.

BEFORE: (Second Still)

With the second image, the obstacle was the window in the back of the room. This posed a problem because of the completely different lighting schemes inside and outside.

1. The first step I took was fixing the white balance. However, in retrospect I think I definitely washed the clip out too much.

2. I then fixed the exposure, as it was a little washed out.

3. Finally, I tried to adjust the colour of the sky outside by using the HSL secondary tool. This was not the most successful grading as I had never used the tool before.

BEFORE: (Third Still)

The third image was a challenge for me because of the light from the lamp and the extremely dark window outside.

1. I first white balanced the image to remove the warmth and then also did some manual temperature adjustment.

2. I then utilised the HSL Secondary feature to fix the colour of the bear on the bed.

3. Finally I attempted to play around with the sharpness to try and dilute the brightness of the lamp, however this proved to be unsuccessful. In the future I would love to learn to dilute the brightness of direct lights in stills, as I couldn’t quite figure out how to do it for this exercise.

In Conclusion: I think it is definitely safe to say that colour grading is not my strong suit, so it was good practise for me to get back to the basics, which is why I chose very simple clips to colour grade. In the future I will begin to practise colour grading with more challenging clips, as I believe the reason I wasn’t too successful with any of these stills is that they didn’t have any blatant colouring issues to fix. I’m aware that none of the changes I made to these stills are very exciting or dramatic, however that was deliberate as I would really like to learn how to make practical changes to my clips before I can experiment with more fun and bold colour grades.