When most people think of color grading usually they think it's super complicated and the colors have to really be dramatic. That is the case sometimes but when a film is shot and light really well it actually doesn't take all that much to really make the image shine. My buddy worked on a civil war era project a while back and gave me some footage to play around with for fun and this is what I came up with. As you look at the images you can see that I really didn't do any major to the image. It's mostly subtle changes and adjustments that make it shine.
As I have mentioned before this is the Log image. This is how the camera records the video to preserve as much detail and dynamic range as possible. It looks dull and flat and really bad but this is exactly what I want as a colorist and filmmaker.
This is the Base or Rec.709 and what the filmmaker would have seen when filming on set. Overall it looks good and most people would like it and there's nothing wrong with that. However, being a filmmaker and colorist I knew I could make it look even better.
This is the final result after working on the image for less than 15 minutes. As you can see I really didn't do all that much but the small adjustments I did do have a big impact.
Heresthre node tree breakdown. Mostly it's just some basic exposure, contrast, and saturation adjustments as well as isolating the tent, sky, and grass to give it an older and more gritty feel. In the end, the changes arent that extreme or complicated and the entire process took less than 20 minutes to create. Just goes to show that sometimes less is more in filmmaking.
