We’re big fans of Alexis Van Hurkman and his fantastic introduction to the art of color grading - The Color Correction Handbook - has a special place on our bookshelf. So we were thrilled when we heard that Alexis would be writing a new SpeedGrade book for our favorite publisher, Peachpit Press.
The power of SpeedGrade lies in the way it allows you to build up color corrections and creative looks as grading layers. Because grading layers are non-destructively applied in SpeedGrade, you can play around to your heart’s content until you get your footage looking just right.
It gets even more interesting when you add grading tracks on the Timeline. Grading tracks allow you to add a new set of grades on top of your clip-based color corrections – and they allow you to do this across multiple clips, or a whole project.
In this post, I’m going to show you how to add a grading track. Continue reading…
Vignettes are a great tool for visual storytelling. They add a depth to shots and they help give digital content a more filmic feel – and Adobe SpeedGrade CS6 offers powerful tools for creating them.
Psychologically, vignettes allow you to focus the viewer’s attention on the subject and subtly mimic the human eye, where color perception drops off around the periphery of our field of vision.
You create vignettes for an individual shot, by adding a mask to a grading layer, within a clip, or by adding a separate grading track on the timeline, for example to go across multiple clips. Colorists sometimes combine vignettes, adding atmosphere and a greater sense of space to their shots. In this post we’re going to look at how to add a single vignette to a shot in SpeedGrade. Continue reading…
Thanks to everyone who joined us for the SpeedGrade webinar with Jeff August last week! In case you missed it, we’ll have a recording of the webinar available in a few days. In this post we’re taking a look at how to apply secondaries in Adobe SpeedGrade CS6.
Secondary color corrections are applied to specific colors within your images – as opposed to primary color corrections which affect the whole image.
For each secondary, you select a color range, and then apply adjustments to just those pixels. Secondary adjustments allow you to accent, modify, or tone down parts of your image. With SpeedGrade, secondary color corrections are added as individual grading layers within the overall grade. Continue reading…
Please join us for SpeedGrade for Aspiring Colorists, a special webinar on August 16, starting at 10:00 am PST.
If you are an editor, and you want to learn about color grading, this course if for you. The session will start with a review of the color tools in Adobe Premiere Pro and then move on to provide a primer in the powerful color correction and look design capabilities of Adobe SpeedGrade CS6. Continue reading…
SpeedGrade CS6 has been out for a few months now and we’re already seeing some great third-party additions. SpeedLooks, created by LookLabs, are a great example, and help to illustrate the power of color grading to dramatically transform your images.
I chatted with colorist Jeff August of LookLabs recently to learn more – quick plug: Jeff will be giving an online seminar on color grading for video editors on August 16
Most color grading workflows include two types of tasks: color correction and look design. Look design is what you do to give your story its individual character: it’s the visual style that communicates mood and place.
For example an action film might have a gritty, de-saturated look; a horror story might have a cold blue otherworldly look, a period piece might have vibrant colors, like a painting or an old color photograph. Different scenes within a film usually use slightly different palettes. In short, look design is a part of storytelling Look design is a very exciting aspect of the new digital filmmaking tools: we never had as much freedom as we do now to define how we want our productions to look.
Before you get to detailed look design, you will usually want to begin by color correcting your shots. Continue reading…
The Look panel is where all the fun happens in SpeedGrade. This is where you apply color corrections and design your look: the two parts of most color grading workflows.
Color correction, sometimes called the “technical grade,” is about making your shots look good and matched.
The creative part of grading is where you give your project its distinctive visual style. Here in SpeedGrade-Land we usually refer to this as “look design.”
To open the Look panel, make sure you have a clip selected on the Timeline (see Four Ways to Load Footage in SpeedGrade for more info). If a clip is not selected, the Look panel tab will remain inactive and you can’t open it. Continue reading…
The origin of SpeedGrade can be traced back to a playback application called FrameCycler, which was first release by IRIDAS in 2001. FrameCycler provided uncompressed playback of frame sequences and was widely adopted in the visual effects community where artists needed an easy way to check their work.
In a recent interview on Animotion (great site, by the way), Lin Kayser, the founder of IRIDAS tells the story. As Lin points out in that interview FrameCycler employed the pixel shader technology in GPUs to provide LUT support in FrameCycler. Pixel shader technology is widely used in gaming to provide really fast screen refresh rates, but is not commonly used professional color applications. Continue reading…
Last time we looked at the SpeedGrade Desktop. This week, let’s look at how to get your content onto the Timeline where you can work on it.
Patrick Palmer, Product Manager for SpeedGrade has created a video which shows how this is done.
There are four ways to get your footage into SpeedGrade. The most automated way to do this is to use the Send to SpeedGrade command in Premiere Pro. The most flexible way is to load an Edit Decision List (EDL) and conform your clips. This allows you to update, or swap out, individual clips, for example. You can also load an existing SpeedGrade project ( an .ircp file). The most manual way, is to add individual clips to the Timeline one-by-one. Continue reading…
Over the next couple of months on this blog, we’re going to walk through the basic areas and features in Adobe SpeedGrade CS6. Today we’re taking a look at the Desktop.
Before we dive into the Desktop, I just want to mention a really cool story by DP and colorist Jerome Sabourin called Why I Use SpeedGrade. Jerome shares a bit of his own journey as a cinematographer, and describes how he uses SpeedGrade in his work. It’s a great read.
Now, back to the Desktop… Continue reading…
Just a quick note to let you know that you can submit detailed feedback on your SpeedGrade experience now. Our Create your review for SpeedGrade CS6 page just went live. Continue reading…
Recently, our friendly Adobe SpeedGrade product manager Patrick Palmer hosted a seminar introducing Adobe SpeedGrade CS6, the professional color grading application which is now part of Adobe Creative Suite 6 Production Premium, Master Collection, and Creative Cloud.
In case you missed it, we have posted a recording of the seminar.
Patrick covered a lot of ground in the seminar, both in the main presentation and in the question-and-answer segment at the end. Here’s a brief outline of what Patrick talked about, as well as some links to more information about each subject: Continue reading…
Today, the SpeedGrade CS6 (6.0.1) update was released. Thank you to everyone for your feedback since the launch of SpeedGrade CS6 last month!
If Adobe Application Manager hasn’t already told you about this, go ahead and check for new updates by choosing Help > Updates. The best way to check for updates is by closing all Adobe applications other than Adobe Bridge, and choosing Help > Updates in Adobe Bridge; this ensures that all processes related to Adobe video applications have been quit and can be updated safely.
Ideally, you should install the updates automatically as described above, but you can also directly download the update packages from the download page for Windows or Mac OS.
For information about updates for other Adobe professional video applications, see this page.
This blog post is for information purposes and not technical discussion. If you have questions or difficulties with this update, please come by the SpeedGrade forum where we can help! Continue reading…
Welcome to Moving Colors, the new SpeedGrade blog! SpeedGrade CS6 is a new addition to Adobe CS6 Production Premium and Creative Cloud Membership and gives you professional color grading tools to take your visual storytelling to the next level.
Color grading used to be the domain of a select few, in part because of the high costs of the technology. But that has changed. Now you can do sophisticated color correction and look design on a laptop if you want to.
The purpose of this blog is to help you bring high-end color grading into your production workflow. SpeedGrade CS6 allows you to do that.
The SpeedGrade UI may seem unfamiliar at first glance: Welcome to the new world of color grading! Actually SpeedGrade CS6 is pretty easy and fun to use once you get comfortable with it.
UPDATED (October 19, 2012): This article has been updated with new links to more recent posts.
