It’s more than just a saturation boost and gives pictures a certain look, but how does it work and how do you do it in software?
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color grading is the art of using saturation, hue, black/white levels and other settings to make a picture “look good” in terms of color
here is one of many guides:
https://news.smugmug.com/a-complete-guide-to-color-grading-and-photography-bdbee13d3466
The way you do it in software is offer the user a number filters, which are really a collection changes to these settings.
You could try to use software to define what “look good” means, to make an auto-adjust color option. But that will get tricky.
When a high end camera captures an image it can capture in a format that takes in as much color information as possible.
Such a format is usually called a wide gamut. Gamut just means a color range. So it’s a wide color range.
A wide gamut format often shows colors and brightness way outside the range of a normal display.
Some popular wide gamut variants like Arri’s Log-C displays the ungraded image in a logarithmic way. Never mind what that means for this explanation, in any case Log-C looks very bleak and unsaturated because it displays all that color magic in a completely balanced an neutral way.
It is then up to a colorist, a grade artist, to accentuate and rebalance the image to bring out the beautiful colors in the image, usually with a certain display in mind.
Phones and TV’s and monitors are often limited to what’s called the rec709 range. So a colorist grading for TV will make the image look good for rec709.
Cinema usually uses P3, so the colorist will grade for P3.
Higher end displays uses High Dynamic Range (HDR). It means they can display more of those pretty colors the camera captured. So a colorist grading for HDR both have more room to work with but can also bring out more of the natural colors.
Part of a colorist’s job is also to be creative and balance color, highlights, shadows, contrast etc. to put a personal touch to what they are grading, be it on their own accord and style or a director or producer’s.
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