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Color correction is storytelling, and most of it happens before the look

Grading gets treated as the thing you do at the end if there is time. Then there is never time, and the film goes out with three shots that do not match and a face that is slightly green.

Two days on getting a picture that holds together: balancing any shot, matching shots that were never meant to match, and building presets that make the color pass fast enough to actually happen on every job.

  • Length2 days
  • FormatOn site or online
  • LanguageNorwegian or English
  • CategoryEditing in Premiere

After the course you can

Color correction and grading for video

  • Balance any shot, including the ones that were badly exposed
  • Match cameras and shots that were never meant to go together
  • Use masks and qualifiers to lift a face or calm a background
  • Read a waveform, a parade scope, and a vectorscope and act on what they say
  • Build a look, save it as a preset, and apply it across a project in minutes

What we cover

The program

Seeing the right picture

  • Color spaces, and making sure your screen shows you the truth
  • RAW, LOG and linear video — what each one is actually giving you
  • Color resolution: what 4:4:4, 4:2:2 and 4:2:0 mean for what you can push
  • Tone mapping: HDR, SDR and LOG material in the same timeline

The correction

  • Balancing a shot — the routine that works every time
  • Fixing over- and underexposure, and color casts
  • Primary and secondary correction, and when to reach for which
  • Masks and qualifiers to isolate part of the frame
  • Matching color and contrast across shots and cameras

The scopes

  • Waveform, parade, and vectorscope, read in practice rather than in theory
  • Legalizing for broadcast, and what happens if you do not
  • Where your eyes are more reliable than the scopes, and where they are not

Look and story

  • The difference between correction, grading, LUTs and looks
  • Memory colors and subjective color perception — why skin is unforgiving
  • Color as part of the storytelling, with examples from films you have seen
  • Using LUTs correctly, and understand color space transforms

Speed

  • Presets, groups, and adjustment layers so a grade takes minutes, not hours
  • Where automatic correction and shot matching are good enough
  • Building looks, adding light leaks, real camera shake and stabilization

The honest bit

Two days will not make you a colorist, and a colorist is not what most productions need. What they need is someone who can make every shot in a piece look like it belongs, quickly, every time — and that is a smaller skill that is entirely learnable in two days.

Who it is for

Video journalists, editors, producers, photographers, content creators, and anyone making video for social, web or broadcast who wants to raise the picture quality. No prior color experience needed.

Prerequisites

You should be able to do basic editing in Premiere.

Bring

Bring shots that gave you trouble. An interview with a color cast, two cameras that never matched, LOG material nobody knew what to do with.

Open courses

Prefer a fixed date for one person?

Also runs as an open course at Qross Kurssenter — classroom in Oslo and live online on the same dates.

Questions

About this course

Do we need a calibrated monitor?

It is not required for the course. Part of the point is learning how much a normal office screen misleads you, and how to work reliably in spite of it using the scopes.

Is this Premiere only, or does it cover Resolve?

It is taught in Premiere's Color mode, but the theory — balancing, matching, scopes, primaries and secondaries — is the same in any system. People who later move to Resolve report that the these skills help them there too.

Can we shorten it to one day?

You can, and then it becomes balancing and matching only. That is genuinely useful, and it is the half that pays for itself fastest — but the look and story half is what people remember.

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Want this for your team?

Tell me what goes wrong today and you get a written plan and a price back. Two sentences is enough.