Color grading
Also known as: color grade, color correction, LUT, video color grading
Color grading is the process of adjusting a video’s color, contrast, and tone to set a look and mood. It builds on color correction, which first fixes exposure and white balance, and is often applied using LUTs (lookup tables) for a consistent style across clips.
- Sets a video’s look, mood, and tone
- Builds on color correction (exposure, white balance)
- LUTs apply a consistent grade across clips
Correction vs grading
Color correction comes first: it neutralizes problems so footage looks accurate — balancing exposure, fixing white balance, and matching shots so they belong to the same scene.
Color grading is the creative layer on top. It shapes the emotional look — warm and golden, cool and moody, high-contrast and punchy — to support the story. A LUT can apply a saved grade to many clips at once for a consistent style.
Footage formats and storage
Serious grading benefits from footage that retains more data — flat or log color profiles and higher chroma sampling give more room to push color without banding. That richer footage is larger, which is one reason pro-grade video takes so much space.
After grading, video is exported and typically re-encoded; compressing the final cut to a delivery bitrate is what keeps the shared file a reasonable size.