I’ve been thinking about “Color Grading” a lot lately. Anyone processing photos digitally has so many people giving their opinions on to color grade your images that it can be very confusing about the way to get the best from your still images. The movie industry is the origin of the color grading where it involves a lot of technical terms like Log, S-Log and other things that I have no clue of their meaning. In a movie you use color grading to link the parts of a story by creating an overall feel by using consistent colors to different parts of a movie or to reinforce the images on the screen. For more information on color grading in movies start with this video: Why are Films Shot In Two Colors?

I’d like to put that at the far end of the workflow of developing an image. There are a lot of things you can or should do before you get to that final color grade step. If you do them correctly then you may not need to spend any time at all fixing the color in you images.

The first step you should take is to make sure you monitors are calibrated. Use any of the available hardware tools for to get the color right before you start. I use the Datacolor Spyder X Pro. If you don’t get the colors that you are seeing right then you have no chance of getting them right when you are adjusting them.

All the discussion below assumes that fact that you are shooting in raw for whatever camera system you are using. If you don’t shoot raw then any other discussion about color or color grading is moot as the camera has already decided what you image is going to look like.

Next is using a good color profile for your image. You can start with the color profiles you camera manufacturer provides with each camera. The processed jpg image you see on the back of you camera using one of the profiles that you manufacturer has provided. Standard, Landscape, and Vivid are some of the profiles provided. (Hint: set your camera to Vivid when shooting sunsets). Current versions of Lightroom and Capture One can be set to use the camera profile when importing you images. If you are using Lightroom you may need to explore beyond the standard Adobe Color profile that Lightroom applies as a default. There are a number of other profiles that Adobe provides that may enhance your image.

And then there is color temperature. Getting the white balance right is so important. Cameras today do a pretty good job of getting the white balance correct. Having a correct white balance means that your other colors will look right too. I find it interesting that most of the time I watch someone else process an image they tend to want to “warm the image up a bit”. Cameras may just be leaning a little to the cool side.

If you, like me, is using a Fujifilm Trans-X camara there are a number of film simulations that are provided as profiles you can use. The film simulation that you have your camera set to will be used by Lightroom or Capture One to process the raw files when they are imported. You can also change the profile after import if you find a profile that works better for a particular image.

If you have picked the profile that pleases you then normally you won’t need to do a lot of saturation adjustments. Although it doesn’t hurt to see what the saturation slider does to the image. I’ll leave you to adjusting the contrast, white and black points, clarity, and other such things for another time.

The big thing for me is that if I’ve applied a Fujifilm film simulation to an image I’ve already chosen how I want my image color graded. So I don’t do a lot of further color processing on my images. For the above “Sunset with Blue Sky” image I used the Fujifilm Provia simulation and just lightened and saturated the blues a bit. Other than that it is the sunset I saw that day. It was a great day for sunset images.