Colour
grading.

Colour is where a film stops looking like footage and starts looking like a film. It is also the stage most often skipped, rushed, or replaced with a LUT dragged onto a timeline — which is why so much otherwise well-shot work still reads as amateur.

Grading is a separate craft from shooting. I work as a colorist on my own productions and as a standalone colorist for other filmmakers, editors and agencies who need someone to finish the image properly.

What the grade involves

• Conform and prep — round-tripping from your NLE, matching timelines, handling mixed sources
• Balance and normalise — correcting exposure, white balance and contrast so every shot starts from a neutral, honest base
• Shot matching — making footage from different cameras, times of day and lighting conditions cut together as one piece
• Primary and secondary grading — building the look with curves, wheels, qualifiers and power windows
• Skin tone work — the part that matters most and gets rushed most, particularly across a range of complexions
• Film emulation — halation, grain and print response when the project calls for it
• Delivery — masters and platform-specific exports in the colour space each destination expects

Skin tones are the whole job

Most stock LUTs are built and tested on a narrow range of skin tones, which is why they so often render darker skin muddy, grey or unnaturally warm. Correcting for that is not a filter problem — it is qualifier and secondary work, done shot by shot.

Coming up shooting HBCU campus events, pageants and music videos means grading a wide range of complexions under bad, mixed, shifting light is the default condition of the job rather than an edge case.

Formats I grade

Log footage from Sony (S-Log3), Canon (C-Log), Panasonic (V-Log), Blackmagic (BRAW) and RED, plus standard rec.709 and iPhone/ProRes Log. If your footage is 8-bit, that limits how far the grade can push — I will tell you honestly what is achievable before you book.

How it works

1. Send a link to the footage and a locked edit (or an XML/AAF/EDL if you want a round trip)
2. Share references — stills, films, anything that communicates the target
3. I return a graded first pass, usually within three to five days
4. Two rounds of revisions are included
5. Final masters delivered in your required codecs and colour space

Working remotely is standard — see remote colour grading for how the review process runs when we are not in the same room.

Common questions