Color correction is the technical process of adjusting footage to achieve accurate, consistent, and natural-looking color across all shots, fixing issues caused by varying lighting conditions and camera settings.
Color correction is the first and most essential step in the post-production color workflow. Before any creative grading can begin, footage must be technically corrected so that it looks natural, consistent, and properly exposed. This involves adjusting white balance to neutralize color casts, setting correct exposure levels, ensuring consistent skin tones, and matching the look between different shots, cameras, and lighting setups.
On a typical multi-camera shoot, different cameras may have slightly different color science, and lighting conditions change throughout the day. Without color correction, cutting between shots would reveal jarring differences in color temperature, brightness, and saturation. A skilled colorist uses scopes — waveform monitors, vectorscopes, and histograms — to make precise, measured adjustments that bring all footage into alignment.
While color correction may seem like a purely technical step, it has enormous impact on the perceived quality of a video. Even without creative grading, properly corrected footage looks professional and polished. Conversely, footage with inconsistent colors, wrong white balance, or poor exposure looks amateurish regardless of how well it was shot. Color correction is the quality foundation that everything else builds upon.
Color grading is the creative process of adjusting the colors, contrast, and overall visual tone of footage to establish a mood, style, or visual identity.
A color space is a defined range of colors that a device or format can capture, display, or reproduce, such as Rec.709 for HD video or DCI-P3 for digital cinema.
A LUT (Look-Up Table) is a mathematical table that maps input color values to output color values, used to quickly apply a specific color transformation or creative look to footage.