The Importance of Colour Grading
Colour grading. The transformative technique involves skillfully adjusting colours, tones, and hues in photographs, films, or videos. For viewers like myself, understanding the role of colour grading is essential in comprehending how a story is conveyed.
As a photographer, I am responsible for crafting the narrative and employing colour as a key for storytelling, allowing the audience to interpret its significance and meaning. Colour grading helps create the mood if it represents a love story, a dramatic/sunset portrait, or a breakup story; colour grading can tell a story in many ways.
I was first introduced to colour grading after watching various Wong Kar Wai films. His colour obsession creates an emotional connection, from playing around the greens and blues to represent the sadness in life or using red to make human emotion.
If you’ve been following my work on Instagram, colour grading plays a significant part in my career, even if it’s client work. It helps create the mood and tone of the picture and helps tell a story. I’ll show an example of my work based on this Instagram series.
Before Color Grading
Featuring the lovely Hannah Parkhouse, I photographed using a 35mm lens of my Sony A7 III while using the Cinebloom Filter. I wanted the portrait to not only create this moody, expressive set but also magically by playing around with the greens and the blues.
After Color Grading
And just like that, a portrait called House Flower is made. I enhanced the orange shadows/highlights for the colour grading while incorporating teal-coloured shades to meld and produce a verdant, ethereal aesthetic seamlessly. Without the application of colour grading, the photo would have lacked its dreamy quality and conveyed an alternate narrative.
Colour grading will forever be a storytelling tool. Its enduring significance stems from years of immersing myself in countless films, an influence that has substantially elevated my photography. I recommend even wedding photographers play around with the colour grading well in Lightroom.
For more of my creative portraits, please check out my Behance profile.
