There's a great tutorial on color grading by Joanna Kustra. It's mainly about photography (she's a fashion photographer) but it applies to movies as well and sh

There's a great tutorial on color grading by Joanna Kustra. It's mainly about photography (she's a fashion photographer) but it applies to movies as well and she takes a lot of inspiration from cinema (old and new). Of course, color grading was always a thing ever since color movies became a thing in the nineteen forties. E.g. Stanley Kubrick, Ridley Scott, or Tim Burton would have been very opinionated on that topic and very intentional in how they capture and process color. Color grading is also something that is subject to fashion. And that's something that we see with recent movies and TV a lot because it is so easy these days. People are trying to imitate the look and feel of other successful works. Joanna Kustra makes a few great points about how colors are associated with particular emotions and moods and how you can be scientific about using e.g. using the color wheel to color grade a particular scene. One key lesson from that is that color grading becomes a lot easier if you simply plan and orchestrate the light of your scene to match what you want rather than trying to fix it in post processing. Old school but really effective. A couple of colored filters for your camera's and lights is still a good investment. Check out her tutorial here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC8ol2-V7Ck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC8ol2-V7Ck. You may want to skip past the sponsored stuff about her monitor though. Modern digital sensors capture a lot of information these days, which makes color grading a lot easier without introducing undesirable artifacts. Better dynamic range of screens also means we can have more colors and tones. So the over saturated look of the nineteen eighties is less of a necessity these days. Recent cameras store color at much greater bit depths and with log profiles which bias towards using most of the bits for storing the darker tones (the human eye is more sensitive there). Of course this is a double edged sword. Because it is so easy, a lot of people do color grading poorly or lazily. Select a filter, click, done. Basically, Instagram is full of people doing that. There's a difference between that and doing it with some skill. Understanding color and tone is actually not that trivial. Some people develop an intuition for it but a lot of this stuff is actually counter intuitive. And funnily enough, a lot of photographers and movie makers actually lack the theoretical background to understand this properly. Aurelien Pierre, one of the lead developers of Darktable has a few nice in depth tutorials on these topics on his youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmsSn3fujI81EKEr4NLxrcg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmsSn3fujI81EKEr4NLxrcg Recent versions of Darktable have some interesting modules that allow you do some really nice things with color grading, tone mapping, perceptual changes to saturation, etc. that he worked on and that definitely make my life a lot easier for post processing my photos.