{"course":{"slug":"video-editing","title":"Editing Video","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/video-editing","level":"beginner","track":"create"},"lesson":{"slug":"correct-before-you-grade","title":"Make it right, then make it feel like something","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/video-editing/correct-before-you-grade","position":40,"of":77,"minutes":10,"answer":"Neutralise and match every shot against the scopes first, because a look applied to unmatched shots produces unmatched results.","keyIdea":"Neutralise and match every shot against the scopes first, because a look applied to unmatched shots produces unmatched results."},"body":{"format":"markdown","text":"## Two different jobs that get mixed together\n\nColour work is two separate operations and doing them in the wrong order wastes most of an evening.\n\n**Correction** is making the shot right: neutral whites, sensible exposure, matching shots that were filmed minutes apart under drifting light so they belong in the same scene.\n\n**Grading** is making it feel like something: teal shadows, warm skin, crushed blacks, a bleached daylight look.\n\nCorrection first, always, and here is the mechanism. A grade is a set of adjustments built on assumptions about where mid-grey sits, where skin sits and where black sits. If shot one is 600 K too warm and a stop underexposed, and shot two is neutral, the identical grade lands on two different starting points and produces two different results. You end up regrading every shot from scratch and the scene still does not match. Correct first so all your shots agree with each other, then one grade travels across all of them.\n\n## Your eyes are lying and the scopes are not\n\nTwo things make eyeballing colour unreliable, and neither is about skill.\n\nChromatic adaptation: look at a warm image for twenty seconds and your visual system rebalances until it looks neutral. Grade for ten minutes and you will keep pushing further in the same direction without noticing. Then you look at it the next morning and it is orange.\n\nAnd your viewing conditions lie. An uncalibrated laptop panel, a room lit by a yellow bulb, a phone with automatic warmth at night: each shifts what you are seeing by more than the adjustments you are making.\n\nSo use the scopes. They are in Resolve's free version, in Kdenlive, and in Premiere.\n\n- **Waveform** for exposure. The vertical axis is brightness. You can see instantly whether highlights are clipping at the top or shadows are crushed against the bottom.\n- **RGB Parade** for white balance. Three waveforms side by side, red then green then blue. In a neutral shot the bottoms should line up and the tops should line up. If blue sits higher at the bottom than red and green, your shadows are blue: pull blue lift down until the bases align. This one reading fixes most white-balance problems in about fifteen seconds.\n- **Vectorscope** for saturation and hue. There is a diagonal reference line between red and yellow, at about the eleven o'clock position (roughly 33 degrees left of vertical; it is the old NTSC I axis at 123°), and human skin of every colour falls close to it. If your faces are pointing well off that line, something is wrong regardless of how the picture feels.\n\n## An order of operations that works\n\n1. **Black point.** Bring the darkest part of the image down until it just reaches the bottom of the waveform without crushing detail you want.\n2. **White point.** Bring the brightest part up until it approaches the top without clipping.\n3. **Mid-tones.** Now set the overall brightness of faces, which is the only exposure the viewer actually judges.\n4. **White balance**, using the parade.\n5. **Saturation**, last and modestly.\n\nOnly then reach for a look.\n\n> Figure: The order that stops you grading everything twice. Steps: 1. Black point (Down until the darkest part just reaches the bottom of the waveform); 2. White point (Up until the brightest part approaches the top without clipping); 3. Mid-tones (The brightness of faces, which is the only exposure a viewer consciously judges); 4. White balance (Align the bottoms, then the tops, of red, green and blue on the parade); 5. Saturation (Last, and modestly); 6. Only now, a look (One grade now travels across every shot in the scene). A look assumes where black, mid-grey and skin sit. Applied to unmatched shots it lands on a different starting point in each one, and you regrade the scene from scratch.\n\n## LUTs are not magic and this is why they disappoint\n\nA LUT (lookup table) maps every input colour to an output colour. Apply a film-emulation LUT to a shot and it can look superb or it can look like a bruise, and the difference is almost never the LUT.\n\nMost cinematic LUTs are built to receive a **log** image: a flat, grey, desaturated signal from a camera set to record maximum dynamic range. Feed one a normal, already-contrasty image and it applies a second dose of contrast and saturation on top of the first, blowing highlights and blocking shadows. Feed it a shot that has not been corrected and it faithfully amplifies the colour cast.\n\nSo: correct first, then apply the LUT, then dial its strength down: most look better at 50 to 70%.\n\nRelated, and worth knowing before you buy a camera: **log recording only helps if the camera has real 10-bit capture.** Log spreads the tonal range thinly so you can redistribute it later. In 8-bit there are only 256 levels per channel to spread, so when you add the contrast back you get visible banding in skies and gradients. Log on an 8-bit phone or entry camera generally costs you more than it gains. Shoot a normal profile, expose it properly, and grade gently.\n\n## The washed-out export\n\nYou grade a piece, it looks right in the timeline, you export it, and the file looks flat and grey in the player. Almost nobody guesses this correctly the first time.\n\nIt is usually a **data-level mismatch**. Video can be tagged as full range, where 8-bit values run 0 to 255, or video range, where black sits at 16 and white at 235. If a file is encoded as one and interpreted as the other, blacks lift and whites dull, and the whole image looks washed. Nothing is wrong with your grade.\n\nLook for a data levels or range setting in your export dialogue, set it to Auto or Video, and check the result in a different player: VLC is free and honest. If it looks right in VLC and wrong in a browser, the tag is the suspect.\n\n## The money rule here is unusually strong\n\nColour is the area where the free tool gives up least. DaVinci Resolve's colour page is what feature films are graded on, and the free version has its node-based grading, power windows, tracker and scopes. The paid Studio version adds temporal and AI noise reduction, Magic Mask, HDR scopes, Dolby Vision mastering and the Film Look Creator's grain and halation. You can learn grading completely without any of them, on the same software the professionals use, at no cost.\n\nKdenlive and Shotcut have basic colour wheels and curves and will handle a straightforward correction. On a phone, colour work is limited to global adjustments and filters; treat it as correction only.\n\n## Today\n\nTake one shot, open the RGB parade, and align the bottoms of the three channels. Do nothing else. Compare before and after."},"check":{"question":"An editor applies a purchased cinematic LUT to footage from a phone. Skies clip to white, shadows go solid black, and skin turns orange. The LUT looks fine in the seller's samples. What is the most likely explanation?","options":[{"text":"The phone footage is 8-bit, and LUTs require 10-bit source data to function at all.","correct":false,"tempting":"Correctly identifies a bit-depth limitation but misapplies it: 8-bit shows banding under heavy grading, not blown highlights."},{"text":"The LUT is built for a different colour space and needs to be converted before it can be applied to any footage.","correct":false,"tempting":"Reaches for a colour-space conversion when the visible symptom is a double dose of contrast on an already-contrasty image."},{"text":"The LUT expects a flat log image as input; the phone footage already has contrast and saturation baked in, so the LUT adds a second helping on top.","correct":true},{"text":"The LUT was applied at 100% strength, and every LUT is designed to be used at partial opacity.","correct":false,"tempting":"Names a real remedy but treats reduced opacity as the design intent rather than a way to soften an already-mismatched transform."}]},"prev":{"slug":"mixing-on-what-you-have","title":"Mixing when you do not have a studio","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/video-editing/mixing-on-what-you-have"},"next":{"slug":"the-node-graph","title":"Why grading happens in a graph","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/video-editing/the-node-graph"},"authorship":"Founder and series editor: Dr Mustafa Mun. Written by AI models to a written standard. Exam keys checked blind by a second model: 3,665 of 3,666 agreed. Academic review invited.","review":{"status":"Draft, open for academic review"},"cite":"Addaly (2026) 'Make it right, then make it feel like something', in Editing Video. Edited by M. Mun. Addaly. Available at: https://addaly.com/learn/video-editing/correct-before-you-grade (Accessed: 31 October 2026).","licence":{"name":"CC BY-NC-SA 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/"},"reader":{"schema":1,"title":"Make it right, then make it feel like something","courseTitle":"Editing Video","module":{"index":5,"slug":"colour","title":"Colour, correction before grade"},"answer":null,"keyIdea":"Neutralise and match every shot against the scopes first, because a look applied to unmatched shots produces unmatched results.","hero":{"kind":"figure","figure":{"t":"figure","label":"Figure 5.1","figure":{"type":"flow","steps":[{"label":"Black point","detail":"Down until the darkest part just reaches the bottom of the waveform"},{"label":"White point","detail":"Up until the brightest part approaches the top without clipping"},{"label":"Mid-tones","detail":"The brightness of faces, which is the only exposure a viewer consciously judges"},{"label":"White balance","detail":"Align the bottoms, then the tops, of red, green and blue on the parade"},{"label":"Saturation","detail":"Last, and modestly"},{"label":"Only now, a look","detail":"One grade now travels across every shot in the scene"}],"title":"The order that stops you grading everything twice","caption":"A look assumes where black, mid-grey and skin sit. Applied to unmatched shots it lands on a different starting point in each one, and you regrade the scene from scratch."},"alt":"Figure: The order that stops you grading everything twice. Steps: 1. Black point (Down until the darkest part just reaches the bottom of the waveform); 2. White point (Up until the brightest part approaches the top without clipping); 3. Mid-tones (The brightness of faces, which is the only exposure a viewer consciously judges); 4. White balance (Align the bottoms, then the tops, of red, green and blue on the parade); 5. Saturation (Last, and modestly); 6. Only now, a look (One grade now travels across every shot in the scene). A look assumes where black, mid-grey and skin sit. Applied to unmatched shots it lands on a different starting point in each one, and you regrade the scene from scratch."}},"blocks":[{"t":"h2","id":"two-different-jobs-that-get-mixed-together","runs":[{"text":"Two different jobs that get mixed together"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Colour work is two separate operations and doing them in the wrong order wastes most of an evening."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Correction","b":true},{"text":" is making the shot right: neutral whites, sensible exposure, matching shots that were filmed minutes apart under drifting light so they belong in the same scene."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Grading","b":true},{"text":" is making it feel like something: teal shadows, warm skin, crushed blacks, a bleached daylight look."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Correction first, always, and here is the mechanism. A grade is a set of adjustments built on assumptions about where mid-grey sits, where skin sits and where black sits. If shot one is 600 K too warm and a stop underexposed, and shot two is neutral, the identical grade lands on two different starting points and produces two different results. You end up regrading every shot from scratch and the scene still does not match. Correct first so all your shots agree with each other, then one grade travels across all of them."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"your-eyes-are-lying-and-the-scopes-are-not","runs":[{"text":"Your eyes are lying and the scopes are not"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Two things make eyeballing colour unreliable, and neither is about skill."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Chromatic adaptation: look at a warm image for twenty seconds and your visual system rebalances until it looks neutral. Grade for ten minutes and you will keep pushing further in the same direction without noticing. Then you look at it the next morning and it is orange."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"And your viewing conditions lie. An uncalibrated laptop panel, a room lit by a yellow bulb, a phone with automatic warmth at night: each shifts what you are seeing by more than the adjustments you are making."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"So use the scopes. They are in Resolve’s free version, in Kdenlive, and in Premiere."}]},{"t":"ul","items":[[{"text":"Waveform","b":true},{"text":" for exposure. The vertical axis is brightness. You can see instantly whether highlights are clipping at the top or shadows are crushed against the bottom."}],[{"text":"RGB Parade","b":true},{"text":" for white balance. Three waveforms side by side, red then green then blue. In a neutral shot the bottoms should line up and the tops should line up. If blue sits higher at the bottom than red and green, your shadows are blue: pull blue lift down until the bases align. This one reading fixes most white-balance problems in about fifteen seconds."}],[{"text":"Vectorscope","b":true},{"text":" for saturation and hue. There is a diagonal reference line between red and yellow, at about the eleven o’clock position (roughly 33 degrees left of vertical; it is the old NTSC I axis at 123°), and human skin of every colour falls close to it. If your faces are pointing well off that line, something is wrong regardless of how the picture feels."}]]},{"t":"h2","id":"an-order-of-operations-that-works","runs":[{"text":"An order of operations that works"}]},{"t":"ol","start":1,"items":[[{"text":"Black point.","b":true},{"text":" Bring the darkest part of the image down until it just reaches the bottom of the waveform without crushing detail you want."}],[{"text":"White point.","b":true},{"text":" Bring the brightest part up until it approaches the top without clipping."}],[{"text":"Mid-tones.","b":true},{"text":" Now set the overall brightness of faces, which is the only exposure the viewer actually judges."}],[{"text":"White balance","b":true},{"text":", using the parade."}],[{"text":"Saturation","b":true},{"text":", last and modestly."}]]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Only then reach for a look."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"luts-are-not-magic-and-this-is-why-they-disappoint","runs":[{"text":"LUTs are not magic and this is why they disappoint"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"A LUT (lookup table) maps every input colour to an output colour. Apply a film-emulation LUT to a shot and it can look superb or it can look like a bruise, and the difference is almost never the LUT."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Most cinematic LUTs are built to receive a "},{"text":"log","b":true},{"text":" image: a flat, grey, desaturated signal from a camera set to record maximum dynamic range. Feed one a normal, already-contrasty image and it applies a second dose of contrast and saturation on top of the first, blowing highlights and blocking shadows. Feed it a shot that has not been corrected and it faithfully amplifies the colour cast."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"So: correct first, then apply the LUT, then dial its strength down: most look better at 50 to 70%."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Related, and worth knowing before you buy a camera: "},{"text":"log recording only helps if the camera has real 10-bit capture.","b":true},{"text":" Log spreads the tonal range thinly so you can redistribute it later. In 8-bit there are only 256 levels per channel to spread, so when you add the contrast back you get visible banding in skies and gradients. Log on an 8-bit phone or entry camera generally costs you more than it gains. Shoot a normal profile, expose it properly, and grade gently."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"the-washed-out-export","runs":[{"text":"The washed-out export"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"You grade a piece, it looks right in the timeline, you export it, and the file looks flat and grey in the player. Almost nobody guesses this correctly the first time."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"It is usually a "},{"text":"data-level mismatch","b":true},{"text":". Video can be tagged as full range, where 8-bit values run 0 to 255, or video range, where black sits at 16 and white at 235. If a file is encoded as one and interpreted as the other, blacks lift and whites dull, and the whole image looks washed. Nothing is wrong with your grade."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Look for a data levels or range setting in your export dialogue, set it to Auto or Video, and check the result in a different player: VLC is free and honest. If it looks right in VLC and wrong in a browser, the tag is the suspect."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"the-money-rule-here-is-unusually-strong","runs":[{"text":"The money rule here is unusually strong"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Colour is the area where the free tool gives up least. DaVinci Resolve’s colour page is what feature films are graded on, and the free version has its node-based grading, power windows, tracker and scopes. The paid Studio version adds temporal and AI noise reduction, Magic Mask, HDR scopes, Dolby Vision mastering and the Film Look Creator’s grain and halation. You can learn grading completely without any of them, on the same software the professionals use, at no cost."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Kdenlive and Shotcut have basic colour wheels and curves and will handle a straightforward correction. On a phone, colour work is limited to global adjustments and filters; treat it as correction only."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"today","runs":[{"text":"Today"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Take one shot, open the RGB parade, and align the bottoms of the three channels. Do nothing else. Compare before and after."}]}],"check":{"question":[{"text":"An editor applies a purchased cinematic LUT to footage from a phone. Skies clip to white, shadows go solid black, and skin turns orange. The LUT looks fine in the seller’s samples. What is the most likely explanation?"}],"options":[{"text":[{"text":"The phone footage is 8-bit, and LUTs require 10-bit source data to function at all."}],"correct":false,"tempting":[{"text":"Correctly identifies a bit-depth limitation but misapplies it: 8-bit shows banding under heavy grading, not blown highlights."}]},{"text":[{"text":"The LUT is built for a different colour space and needs to be converted before it can be applied to any footage."}],"correct":false,"tempting":[{"text":"Reaches for a colour-space conversion when the visible symptom is a double dose of contrast on an already-contrasty image."}]},{"text":[{"text":"The LUT expects a flat log image as input; the phone footage already has contrast and saturation baked in, so the LUT adds a second helping on top."}],"correct":true,"tempting":null},{"text":[{"text":"The LUT was applied at 100% strength, and every LUT is designed to be used at partial opacity."}],"correct":false,"tempting":[{"text":"Names a real remedy but treats reduced opacity as the design intent rather than a way to soften an already-mismatched transform."}]}],"order":[1,0,3,2],"why":null},"prev":{"slug":"mixing-on-what-you-have","title":"Mixing when you do not have a studio","minutes":8},"next":{"slug":"the-node-graph","title":"Why grading happens in a graph","minutes":8}}}