I have worked with a few videographers on big shoots, but don’t have much experience myself other than little behind the scenes type of videos shot with an iPhone. One thing I noticed is that the initial footage is always super washed out. Then they color correct it, and bam! Awesome footage.
Why do they shoot it that way? It’s obvious to me that there’s a reason— they’re I professionals, and they know what they’re doing— but I have no idea what that reason is!
In: Technology
Because when you shoot, there is only so much you can do to make it look a certain way. Filming “flat” yes, looks dull and desaturated, but this is a lot better because it retains way more information in this form. Ever notice how old black and white photos looked pretty dang good detail wise, but recording in color when it came out it got a bit iffy? You can also use scopes to adjust everything properly, monitors and lighting conditions can change how color comes across to your eyes, but the actual hard-coded data of scopes is accurate. Is that blue sky the actual proper shade of blue? Is that green t-shirt actually green? Is that white wallpaper actually white? This lets you figure out the information of if a shot has too much of one color, whether red, green, or blue. Maybe that dark room shot looks a little too warm, lets dial the red back and add a small bit of blue.
You have four primary things to focus on for colors. **Primary color correction, Secondary color correction, Continuity, and Artistic choice.**
**Primary color correction**, this is going to be things like contrast, saturation, gamma, white balance, etc. You balance the shadows and the light out. If the footage is outside, you want to balance it for daylight conditions. If you’re outside at night and there are a bunch of sodium streetlamps blasting yellow all over the shot, you can compensate for that as well. This is the overall ‘look’ of the film.
**Secondary color correction**, this is going to be the more finer details of the shot. You’re picking small aspects of what is on screen and further correcting them to look a certain way. Let’s say you have a car in the middle of a parking lot, maybe you want to make the color pop a little more, so you create a ‘power window’ to apply just to the car, adjust the exposure/brightness, do whatever else you want, and it pops out much more now.
**Continuity**, lighting conditions can change very easily going from different shoots, and of course different times of the days. If you shoot a scene at noon, then the second scene at 2pm, but then have to redo shot #1, it’s going to look a litttle odd with the different lighting conditions. Let’s also say you have something you’re filming during winter, but it’s a movie set during summer, you can adjust the color and make it more vibrant!
**Artistic choice,** Different colors will go with a certain mood. Let’s say you have a shot of someone walking through a foggy forest. Well, a horror movie might invoke a dreary blue tinge, making it look spooky. Maybe it’s an action movie, so the character clothes are brightened, and the fog might take up a lighter brighter haze, and maybe you have a sad drama, you can go with more mtued colors. This is slightly more complicated than ELI5 but I hope the point gets across.
Let me try and maybe fit it more into ELI5: There are four things to focus on. Primary, and secondary correction. Primary is like messing with the lighting level and making the colors a little more natural, making the entire movie one ‘color’ scheme. Secondary correction is more picking smaller details out of a shot and changing their specific colors rather than the entire shot. Artistic correction is more where the director can add their own ‘pizazz’ and continuity is just balancing everything a tad to ensure the shot B that actually came *before* shot A, looks like it was recorded *after* shot A
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