Video color correction is a standard element of the video edit. It can also enhance a project in more ways than equalizing skin tones and fixing exposure issues. The coloration of a scene or shot can affect the piece’s mood, its theme, or the story itself, enhancing or subduing subtextual elements as necessary. By emphasizing particular props, characters or specific visual elements, it can pull the audience’s eyes to important story and plot elements. The proper use of color is as effective in evoking a psychological or emotional response as the skillful manipulation of motion, lighting and composition.
Good directors of photography must maintain a careful balance of aesthetic convention, shooting style and technical considerations with the piece’s symbolism, theme and narrative. Every element must harmonize with the next in order to support the director’s vision, the production design and the script. Good video editors must do the same with the elements of their craft: pace, continuity, movement, audio and color. Content, director-instruction and overall quality are the just a few important factors to consider in the decision-making process.
Regardless of the type of project you may be working on, correcting shooting errors is important. Live event shoots like those for documentary projects and news-gathering must often take place in circumstances where lighting, subject movement and other factors are out of the control of the camera operator, so they are especially prone to lighting problems, shifting col temperatures etc.
Image problems also tend to occur more frequently in low-budget productions, where camera gear and lighting equipment rental may be constrained. However they happen, image problems need to be fixed and coloration continuity errors solved before moving into advanced colorization.
After basic cleanup and balancing has been performed, the art of colorization is applied. Remember: color has meaning. In the natural world, it can be a sign of danger or venom, fertility, ripeness, that the seasons are shifting, that a storm is coming, etc. For our part, our species imbues it with the whole gamut of human emotion – angry red, cowardly yellow, envious green, and so on.
Common elements of our daily life have created general psychological associations also, and these are almost always highly contextual – a red rose on a table for two communicates romance, a red exclamation point on a computer says ‘error’, a red light on the road means ‘stop’, and so on. When enhancing, adding or otherwise manipulating subtext with video color correction, paying heed to natural/primal reactions, psychological associations and socialized connotations is crucial.
When Neo is in the Matrix, green dominates, and we wait with bated breath for Agents to show up. That glistening red apple in Snow White’s ivory hand is chilling in the anxiety it evokes. The Muggle world is so much less vibrant than Hogwarts that magic surrounds us. When the hero kisses the girl and everything takes on a golden glow, a ‘happily ever after’ is soon to follow. As a story-telling tool, video color correction is powerful.
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