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A plain explanation of the step that gives films and videos their look, how it differs from correction, and how to try both on a clip of your own.
Color grading is the creative stage of video colour work: shaping the colour and contrast of footage to give it a mood or a consistent style, such as warm and nostalgic, cool and tense, or the teal-and-orange of a blockbuster. It usually follows colour correction, which first makes the picture accurate by fixing white balance, levels and mismatched shots. Correction makes a shot look right; grading makes it look intended.
In everyday speech, “colour grading” often covers both jobs, and editing apps mix the words too, so it helps to know which one a tutorial means. You can see the difference on your own footage with the tool above: correct the colour with one press, then try a cinematic grade on top and flip Before and after to compare.
Open the clip with Select video and press Auto colour (A) to balance white and set the levels. If a cast remains, open Pro tools, then use Pick white (W) on something neutral, or nudge Temperature and Tint in Basic. Log footage gets converted first, with the Footage menu.
The Waveform shows where the light sits from left to right across the frame, Parade splits it into red, green and blue, and the Vectorscope shows hue and saturation, with a skin tone line to check faces against.
If the clip has to sit next to others, use Match colours with a frame or photo as the reference, or apply one grade everywhere with Copy grade and Paste grade.
Choose a look from Looks (or All looks, L) and set Intensity, or build your own with Wheels, Curves and HSL. Check it with Before and after (B), then select Export video.
Correction removes problems the camera introduced. A clip shot under orange bulbs is pulled back towards neutral, a flat shot gets proper blacks and whites, and two angles of the same scene are made to agree so a cut between them is invisible. Its goal is measurable: white objects read as white, skin falls near the skin tone line on the vectorscope, and nothing important is clipped.
Grading is a choice. Cooling the shadows of a night scene, pushing a flashback towards faded yellow or desaturating everything except a red coat are decisions about how the audience should feel, not repairs. There is no single right answer, which is why the same footage can be graded a dozen ways.
Grade an uncorrected clip and you grade its faults too. A look designed for neutral footage, applied to a shot that is already too blue, simply makes it bluer, and two shots with different casts stay different after the same look goes on. Most creative LUTs also expect normal Rec.709 input, so log footage must be converted before a look is added. The order colourists follow is therefore:
In this tool those map to Wheels (Lift, Gamma, Gain, Offset), Curves, HSL, LUT and Effects under Pro tools, with the Waveform, Parade, Vectorscope and Histogram scopes at the top. Our LUT guide explains the file formats in more depth.
Rec.709 (ITU-R BT.709) is the international standard for HD video. It fixes the red, green and blue primaries, the white point and how brightness is encoded, and almost every phone video, YouTube upload and TV broadcast in standard dynamic range uses it. When people talk about a “Rec.709 LUT”, they mean a conversion that turns camera footage into that normal, viewable colour.
Log footage is the opposite of finished. Cameras with a log profile store a wide range of light in a flat, grey-looking curve so there is room to grade later. It must be converted to Rec.709 (or an HDR standard) before it looks right, which is a correction step, not a look. The log to Rec.709 page covers each camera’s profile.
For a phone clip headed to social media, a correction and a look can take a minute or two. A short commercial may spend a day or more with a colourist, and feature films are commonly graded over a period of weeks, because every shot is balanced against its neighbours and checked on calibrated displays. Most of that time goes into consistency, not into inventing the look.
Correction makes footage accurate and consistent: neutral whites, sensible levels, matching shots. Grading is the creative look applied afterwards to set a mood. Correction comes first, because a look applied to uncorrected footage carries its colour cast along with it.
In film and TV it is the final colour pass, done by a colourist after the edit is locked. Every shot is balanced to its neighbours and the whole production is given its visual style, then checked for the delivery format, such as cinema, broadcast or streaming.
A LUT is a tool that stores a colour transform, so it can do either job. A technical LUT, such as a camera maker’s log-to-Rec.709 file, is correction. A creative LUT carries a look, which is grading. Most grades still need tweaks around a LUT, since it cannot know your shot’s white balance.
The ITU standard for HD video colour: it defines the primaries, white point and brightness encoding that standard-dynamic-range video uses. Most phone footage, web video and HD television is Rec.709, and log footage is converted to it before grading.
A single phone clip can be corrected and given a look in a few minutes. Longer projects take far more, because each shot must match the ones around it; feature films are commonly graded over weeks.
No, it is correction. Auto colour measures a few frames on your device, balances white and sets a gentle levels stretch with a little vibrance. It is measurement and maths rather than generative AI, and it leaves the creative look to you.
Not always. Phones already apply their own processing, so many clips only need a small correction. Grading earns its place when you want a consistent style across clips, a particular mood, or when you shot in a log format that needs converting.