Should I worry About Color Grading?

I’m interviewing people for an oral history project. I’ve always thought the story should be the most important thing I focus on in my videos. 

Even before reading your book I kept production very simple, mostly because I didn’t and still don’t know everything about the  technical side of video. Reading your book reassured me that I was, for the most part focusing on the right thing. 

But now I hear a lot of people talk about color grading videos.

Should I be worried about color grading? What is it? Is it important?

— Robby

Movies like Wicked (2024) push color grading to magical levels—deep greens, glowing golds, and cool shadows to build an entire world. But for your everyday videos? You might not even need it. Here’s what actually matters more…

Color and light are super important to telling a story in video. Color Grading per se?  Not so much. Color grading, like all video tech, is just a tool to help you make your video look the way you want it to. And with today’s phones and cameras, for most day-to-day video, It’s optional. 

What is Color Grading? 

“Color grading” is the professional term for adjusting the color and lighting of your footage after its been shot and edited. The folks who do it for a living are artists, who use computer programs to paint with light by literally changing the frequency of colors in your finished piece.

They make green leaves orange for autumn, change an actor’s eye color, make a desert scene look hotter, an arctic scene look colder, and save your butt if, say, you overlit a romantic night shot and it looked like crap coming out of the camera. 

Not that this has ever happened to me. 

TV shows, commercials and film projects are almost always color graded to within an inch of their lives. Reality and doc less so—they may simply use the tools in their editing program to touch up here and there. Because dedicated, professional color grading is expensive. 

Many projects go without any formal color grading at all. Here’s why:

Tell me again why I shouldn’t have to worry about it

Smartphones and consumer/pro-sumer cameras have built-in “auto” functions to make your color and lighting look amazing—they’re actually “color-grading” as you shoot. 

These algorithms work hard to save your video from looking awful. Try shooting a badly-lit sunset shot on a new-ish smart-phone. It’s nearly impossible. 

If you like the way your footage looks, Color Grading is optional. If you want to play with it, turn off the auto exposure functions on your camera or phone before you shoot.  Load your footage into your editing program of choice and have at it. If you want to go big, you can download DaVinci Resolve, a free professional (and complicated) color-grading/editing system for your computer. 

What You Should Worry About Instead 

Regardless of whether you color grade, video is garbage in, garbage out—if you shoot ugly stuff, it will still be ugly later. So don’t.

Help your camera’s algorithms give you great looking video by focusing on what’s really important:  make sure your scene has enough light, that you’re on a location that looks great to your eye and through the camera, and that the real-life colors in costumes and make-up work for your video. And worry about all that before you roll.

Then you’ll never have to worry about color grading. It will just be another creative tool if you need it.

Do you have a burning question? A smoldering question? A question not quite on fire? Ask them all here!

Get a free preview of the new video course!

Sample two lessons from our new video course free right now. No signup or credit card required!

Preview the Course