The term that is often used along with color grading is color correction. Nowadays, color grading is almost always done digitally, but in the “olden days”, it was a long and exhausting process, also called color timing, and it was done in the film labs. Well, this is the magic of color grading. You don’t need to be explicitly told in which of the kingdoms you are, right? You would know it just by the colors! In some movies, the scheme will be created for the whole movie, and the producers would stick with it for the whole thing, while in others, a different color palette will be used to emphasize different parts of it – the setting, the emotions, etc. This process of “painting over images” is done in the post-production phases of the work of a filmmaker and serves the purpose of emphasizing an emotion, feeling, and overall setting, even suggesting what’s to come by the “simple” use of colors and color scheme manipulation. No matter if we’re talking about filmmaking, video editing, or even image retouching, color grading is a necessary process for all of those who want to make their work a masterpiece. This brilliant “tool” is called color grading, and if you want your videos to really communicate with your viewers, you need to learn more about the color grade and the use of color palettes, and there’s no better time than now.

And sure, music plays a role too, but have you noticed the color palette changes too? Every movie buff out there, or better yet, every single person who’s ever watched a movie, will know that feeling of sensing what’s about to happen before it even happens.

Color wheel of emotions in film