Color grading
Also known as: grading, color grade
The creative stage of color work that gives footage a deliberate look or mood - warm, cool, punchy or film-like - after it has been technically corrected.
Updated
What it means
Color grading is the creative pass on color. After color correction has made the footage technically sound - neutral whites, proper exposure, matching clips - grading pushes it toward a look: warm golden-hour tones for a surf trip, cool desaturated blues for a winter mountain film, deep blacks and strong contrast for a gritty urban edit.
A grade shapes how the viewer feels about the footage and makes clips from different days look like one piece. Feature films use it to separate storylines; in action edits it is often what makes a reel look like a brand film rather than a dump of camera files.
How it works in practice
Grading starts with the right source. A flat log profile such as DJI D-Log M or Sony S-Log3 keeps more highlight and shadow detail, and 10-bit recording gives the grade room to move before banding appears. Footage in a standard color profile can be graded too, just more gently.
In DaVinci Resolve the common approach is a node tree: one node to convert log footage to Rec.709 with a conversion LUT, then nodes for contrast, targeted hue shifts and a vignette. A popular look is teal-and-orange, which pushes shadows toward cyan and skin tones toward orange. Applying the look on an adjustment layer or a group keeps every clip consistent.
What to watch out for
Grading before correcting is the classic order mistake. If one clip is too blue and another too dark, a look applied on top amplifies the differences. Fix exposure and white balance on each clip first, then add the creative layer.
Skin and water give bad grades away. Heavy teal-and-orange can turn faces orange and the sea an unnatural cyan. Keep an eye on the skin-tone line in the vectorscope and dial the effect back - most good grades are subtler than beginners expect. Check the result on a phone screen, where most viewers will watch, and avoid pushing 8-bit H.264 footage so far that the sky breaks into bands.
How RawClip handles it
RawClip does not apply a color grade or a LUT you choose. If you want a specific look, grade your clips in your own editor and export them as MP4 or MOV before uploading. Footage shot in a log profile is best converted to normal contrast first, so your highlight does not come out flat and washed out.