Lesson 3: Colour Correction
Ready on set? Welcome to DRIFF’s DIY Film School, where we introduce you to some tips and tricks that any aspiring filmmaker can try from the comfort of their home. We’ll guide you through exercises to sharpen your skills as a filmmaker, showing you the basics of what it takes to succeed behind the camera so you can start shooting your own films today.
Lesson 3
Colour Correction
Every film and television production today utilizes colour correction to create mood, emotion and aesthetic that fits their production. Colour correction helps communicate the tone and feeling of a production to its audience. With modern technology, there is an opportunity for people to make movies on their phones now as digital filmmaking has made editing tools accessible to everyone. As a result, this skillset has become very important and a vital tool to make the film project stand out.
In the past, filmmakers relied on gel films, and chemically processing film to convey tone and mood. But modern colour correcting allows filmmakers the option to adjust the mood and tone of a film long after the scenes were filmed. Since the early 2000s post production colour correction has been widely adopted in the film industry. With O’Brother Where Art Thou (2000) by the Coen Brothers being the first Hollywood Production to use digital colour correction. The Coen brothers used this process to further desaturate the image of the film, to emulate the look of older photographs. This was noted to be too difficult to do with traditional photochemical processes as they bound themselves with pre-produciton choices, unable to alter them once filming was complete.
Luckily, one of the best video editing software programs for editing and colour correction is easily accessible for free through Davinci Resolve which can also be used for visual effects and audio post-production. Numerous films have used this program, such as John Wick Chapter 4 (2023), Avatar (2009), and Alien: Covenant (2017), cementing this program as an industry standard. While films such as these already have looks in mind before production begins, colour correction can serve to fine-tune the process and make specific changes to enhance the intended look.
Davinci Resolve uses tabs to break up the different processes of editing such as edit, colour and cut media. This helps users easily divide their workflow and bounce between various aspects of editing so that the video, audio, and music you import will be added to the media pool. At this stage you can click and drag clips into the timeline (where your project lives) to tweak the look of the image.
It is easy to do! To start, grab the footage you want onto the timeline. It is important that you start on the Edit tab to implement your footage within the project before moving onto the colour tab to begin your correction. Before you do anything make sure that you hit the gear icon in the button right corner. After doing this a window will pop up with different settings in the top left on the window. Go to the Colour Science bar, scroll down, and press Colour Managed setting. The Colour Managed setting ensures that you are starting a neutral point where you can begin making changes to the look of the image. After this is done you can begin to experiment with Colour Correction–before getting too deep into it I recommend that you create new Nodes to organize the changes made to the image. Nodes are essentially layers that give users the ability to separate the changes you want to make. Say you want to change the contrast and the brightness, these can be done on two separate Nodes. Right clicking allows you to see the changes made by hiding and showing the Node.Nodes are also great for organization because you can create labels through each Node concerning the changes you want to make to your image.
You will first see colour wheels within the colour tabs labeled ‘Lift’, ‘Gamma’, ‘Gain’ and ‘Offset’. ‘Lift’ adds a hue to the darkest parts of the image; ‘Gamma’ impacts the areas in between the darkest and lightest parts of the image, ‘Gain’ affects the brighter parts of the image, and ‘Offset’ deals with the amount of colour we want to push onto the image. All these wheels can be impacted by clicking on the wheel or moving around the slider.
Additionally, suppose you want a better idea of how dark and bright the image's colours are. In that case, scope is a handy tool that shows an image's dark and light points based on where the waveform is positioned horizontally. The lower parts of the graph are the darker parts of the image, and the brighter parts are higher up on the image.
Modern colour correction has forever changed the way the mood and look of a film is achieved and is now a vital aspect of post production. While audiences aren’t aware of the way a film has been manipulated during post production–they feel it. Films give off different moods depending on the colours and filters used, it’s a subconscious effect but powerful as it allows directors to communicate emotion without explicitly stating it to viewers. Filmmakers on a smaller scale implementing this within their work gives them a colour signature to their work and more importantly gives a film staying power that audiences long after it’s over. All in all, colour correction gives films a look, a style and Davinci Resolve has been a go to for various large scale productions Colour Correction is an important and vital process within the industry, especially if you want viewers to recognize visual stables of your own work.
Connor Walsh is Photographer, Video Editor, and Writer based in Southern Ontario.
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If you’re interested in becoming part of a local film community or attending a film festival near you, the Durham Region International Film Festival’s events are for you! DRIFF presents an annual fall film festival in Durham Region, summer drive-in movie screenings in Whitby and DRIFF in a Jiff short film screenings in Oshawa. Visit driff.ca, become a DRIFF insider or follow us on social media at @catchthedriff for all the details.