01
What is the difference between color correction and color grading?
Correction makes the footage accurate; grading makes it look a particular way. Correction comes first and is technical: setting white balance so white things look white, bringing exposure to a sensible level, recovering detail in highlights and shadows, and matching clips from different cameras or different times of day so they cut together without a jump.
Grading comes second and is a creative decision: warmer or cooler, more or less contrast, a muted or saturated palette, a look that suits the brand. Doing them in that order matters. A creative look or LUT applied to uncorrected footage amplifies whatever was wrong underneath — a blue cast becomes a stronger blue cast — and every clip ends up needing its own fix. Footage shot in a LOG or RAW profile looks flat on purpose and always needs the correction step before it resembles the scene.
02
What can you do during filming to make colour work easier?
Set white balance manually instead of leaving it on automatic, which shifts as the camera moves between windows and lamps and leaves the editor matching drifting colour clip by clip. Avoid mixing light sources of different colours on the same face; daylight from a window and warm bulbs overhead pull skin in two directions at once, and no setting fixes both.
Expose for the skin and protect the brightest areas. A white shirt, a sky or a polished surface that is blown out to pure white has no detail left to recover. If you have several cameras, set them to the same profile, frame rate and white balance before the shoot, and film a few seconds of the same scene on all of them for reference. Tell the editor which profile was used and send any LUT supplied by the camera maker, so the correction starts from the right place.
