Colour Grading

A lot of the footage from the first shoot came out with a red tinge to it, so when I took it into Final Cut Color I began by removing some of this red on the primary grade. When I started to remove some of the red I found that the darker areas, such as the characters skin became too blue. To correct this I went into the three way colour wheel which can be seen at the top and I added a little more red into the shadows. This gave my footage a realistic look, and also kept with the style of The Lovely Bones.

I added a number of secondary grades to the footage, especially on the close ups. This allowed me to darken the background and keep the character in good light. My final grade for the first section of the film can be seen in my final piece.

For the second section of my piece I did two different colour grades. My initial grade made all the footage look realistic, as the original footage was quite blue and dull. I went through each shot and removed the blue from the mid tones. I also pushed the red and green mid tones up a little bit. This gave the footage quite a bright, saturated look.


Cinematography (Part 2) - Initial Grade from Laura Johnson on Vimeo.

However, when I looked at the initial grade in comparison to The Lovely Bones, I found that the colour wasn't the same. The colour grading that I did made it look realistic, however, the colour grading in The Lovely Bones is quite green and yellow, making it seem quite surreal. So I took the footage back into Final Cut Color and re-graded it.

I began by removing the blue, as I did in the initial grade, however, in this grade I did not changed the red and green mid tones. Instead, I adjusted these in the secondary grading tab. I didn't bother applying a vignette to the first secondary grades as I wanted it to effect whole of the shot. I pushed the mid tones, shadows and highlights into a yellow colour, this gave a similar look to The Lovely Bones.

The final grade for the second part of my piece can be seen in the final film.