What is color grading? What does a digital colourist do?

If you’ve seen Wes Anderson films like The Grand Budapest Hotel, you’ve seen what a digital colourist is capable of. They have the ability to create fantastic worlds and transport the viewer to the world imagined by the filmmaker.

Colouring is a crucial process in making a film true to life, or true to whatever aesthetic is envisioned by the director and director of photography. A digital colourist edits the scenes to provide the kind of tone or mood that the director wants. Maybe a bloody scene needs to look bloodier, or a dull scene with poor lighting needs to look brighter, or a modern looking scene in a medieval epic needs to look vintage — the digital colourist can deliver these requirements. The colourist may also fix blemishes on the actors to make them look good. This is especially the case with close up shots, where the skills of a colourist may be needed to make the actor look flawless.

Colourists are like the “mastering engineers” of films, because they make sure that all the shots in each scene match one another, by balancing colour saturation and luminance from shot to shot. Not one shot should stick out oddly in the sequence — the colourist makes sure of that.