Color correction
Also known as: color balancing, primary correction
The technical first pass on color: fixing exposure, white balance and contrast so clips look natural and match each other before any creative look is added.
Updated
What it means
Color correction is the technical repair stage of color work. The goal is not a style but accuracy: whites that look white, skin that looks like skin, exposure where highlights are not clipped and shadows still hold detail. Only once footage is corrected does it make sense to move on to color grading.
The other half of the job is matching. A highlight assembled from a GoPro, a DJI drone and a phone will show three different color responses to the same scene. Correction brings them close enough that cuts between cameras do not jump in brightness or tint.
How it works in practice
Editors usually work in a fixed order: exposure, then white balance, then contrast and saturation. In DaVinci Resolve that means the Lift, Gamma and Gain wheels plus the temperature and tint controls; in Premiere Pro, the Basic Correction section of Lumetri. Scopes beat eyes - the waveform shows whether highlights are clipping, and the vectorscope reveals a color cast.
For a fast match between cameras, pick one hero clip, correct it and use it as the reference for the rest. Resolve can also match shots automatically, and a gray card filmed at the start of a session makes white balance a single click. Shooting with a locked white balance, such as 5500K in daylight, avoids the drift auto mode causes when a camera turns from sun into shade.
What to watch out for
Correction cannot recover what was never recorded. A sky clipped to pure white stays white, and 8-bit footage pulled too far shows banding and noise, which is why 10-bit recording pays off for heavy correction. Expose for the highlights when shooting, especially on snow and water.
Underwater footage is the toughest case. Water absorbs red light within the first few meters, so clips turn blue-green. Software can pull some red back, but the result gets noisy when the red channel is nearly empty - a red filter or lights on the dive help far more. Also be wary of correcting on a laptop screen at full brightness in a dark room: footage that looks right there often ends up too dark everywhere else.
How RawClip handles it
RawClip does not correct underwater colors and does not apply color grades or LUTs you choose, so any correction you want should happen before upload. Fix white balance or exposure in your editor, export as MP4 or MOV, then upload; clips that need no fixing can go in exactly as they came off the camera.