I took three clips from the documentary I am currently working on and colour graded them in a few different ways each. Firstly I have this sign in which was torn up and thrown in the bin at the UPF protest.
This is the original image.
For this colour grade I made the shadows a blue hue while changing the midtowns and highlights to a warm yellow/orange colour tone. I changed the input levels of black and white to create a greater contrast. I changed the tonal range to make the reduce the highlights purely to the white paint on the cardboard and feathered the midtowns and shadows together to reduce a sharp line on shadow. In addition I saturated the warm mid-tones and the blue shadows to create this nice cool cinematic grading.
This image is pretty similar to the original. Once again I gave the shadows a blue tone as well as the midtowns this time and dragged the highlights towards to pink. I changed the tonal levels to create a greater contrast. The tonal range was changed as to isolate the writing as the only highlights. The highlight saturation was then boosted to 200% saturation and the shadow at 50% as an attempt to make the painted words stand out.
I isolated the highlights to the paint with the tonal range and then saturated the highlights fully with the colour pink and lowered the master saturation down to 80%. Once again I made the black blacker and the white whiter with the input controls to create a greater contrast. And issue with this colour grade is that not all the paint is turned pink, due to it being in a shadow. If I wished to make it pink it would cause the brightest parts of the bin to be changed to that colour also.
This is the original image of a UPF leader speaking at the Bendigo rally.
For this colour grade I made the shadows blue while making the midtowns and highlights an orange hue. I feathered the shadows and midtowns together using the tonal range slider. Once again I created a contrast with the black and white inputs and desaturated the image to 80%.
This is similar to the image above except I added more black and less white with the input slider. Also I created a wider range of highlights when feathering the highlights and mid-tones with the tonal slider. Furthermore the image is desaturated to 50%.
For this image I simply desaturated it completely to make it black and white.
This is screenshot from the original video of anti-islamic supporters bearing Australian flags at the UPF rally.
Once again I made the shadows blue and the midtowns and highlights a warm yellow-orange tone. I saturated the highlights to create that warm yellow glow in the sky. I created a significant contrast with the black and white input levels. I made it so the highlights were mostly the sky as well as some reflections off peoples skin, and limited the shadow. I then raised the master saturation levels to 120%.
This colour grade was mostly obtained by greatly desaturating the mid-tones and shadows while doubling the saturation of the highlights.