Colour Grading; how it shapes your emotions and how to take control of it in your communication

Every piece of footage we capture gets individually adjusted in brightness, contrast and colour saturation, adding vignettes, visual masks that use motion tracking as the camera moves, then visual ‘noise’ removal through software such as Neat Video. 

The important point is that humans will always look at the brightest part of a screen - so we need to make sure it’s the subject being filmed! In the example below, the presenters take a step forwards from the well-lit seating, to present on a lower block to the audience - this means stepping into a relatively darker area.

In the edit, I thus need to reduce the background brightness and introduce a highlight over the speakers face using a 'mask', then use motion tracking to have that brightness follow the speaker as they move to and fro.. simple! :)

If you have sound, watch the following to see the process in real time and learn all about it -

This in itself is only a technical run through of grading, when we talk about colour as emotion the rabbit hole goes so much deeper - on a fortnightly basis I find myself visiting https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel/ and using their selector to create palettes for presentations, for web graphics to match video content, all sorts of things - I also use a https://www.iconico.com/colorpic/ or the Google Chrome extension to grab a colour I see on screen, then take that into the Adobe Color wheel to find analogous or similar colours depending on what feel I want to create in the communication I'm crafting.

Have a watch of the following;

And be aware of Bayhem! :)

Thank you for reading - if you learnt something, please give this article a like, click share and leave a comment!

Check back each Tuesday and Thursday as we move through this series on how you can transform your organisation into a story telling, profit-generating machine!

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Part 1 - How we bake your cake at Bravo Charlie - Initial Gap Analysis

Part 2 - Culture Design Day #1 - Exploration

Part 3 - Researching, Developing and Delivering Your Digital Systems and Marketing Strategy

Part 4 - Customer and Stakeholder Interviews, Competitor and Market Research

Part 5 - Photography - Do you know a good image?

Part 6 - Initial Filming of Staff, Facilities and Customers

Part 7 - How To Leverage Your proud customers

Part 8 - How long does filming take?

Part 9 - Editing; Where the magic happens

Part 10 - Colour Grading - Shaping Emotion & Controlling Communication

Part 11 - High quality audio - everything you need to know for better sound in life

Part 12 - The need for captions in modern delivery

Part 13 - Music, language of the soul

Part 14 - Implementing your New Sales Machine

Part 15 - Making an event out of your launch and generating twice your outlay in sales

Part 16 - How to turn your team into content creators - Culture Design Day #2

Part 17 - How to Achieve High Quality Regular Content Production that Drives Sales

Part 18 - Your total time commitment to go through a Digital Transformation

Part 19 - Translations and a global focus

Part 20 - Efficient Workflows - The Keys To The Content Castle

Part 21 - Turning Your Knowledge Into Sales Tools