How a Pro Colorist Maximizes Color Separation

In this article, I’m going to show you one of the simplest and fastest ways you can increase the visual impact of your images when you’re color grading. I’m talking about color separation or what is sometimes called color contrast. It’s something we should always be thinking about when we’re working on our grades.

As a professional colorist, it’s very rare for me to look at an image and say, “Gosh, there’s just too much color separation!” It’s far more common for me to want more color separation, which also gives more fullness to my images. Let me show you how I work through a grade while keeping color separation in mind.

Using the overall look for color separation

We’ll start with a set of clips that haven’t been graded yet.

In this timeline, I have a clean group of images that I haven’t done any grading on whatsoever. I’ve already set up my overall color management, and I am now ready to dive into implementing an overall look.

This overall look is not something I want to skip right past. It’s our first big opportunity to introduce some color separation. To give you a sense of what I mean, let’s go over to the Timeline section of the node graph, which is where we can apply adjustments that are going to impact every shot in our timeline.

The looks from my Voyager LUT pack give our image some color separation from the get-go.

I’ve already selected a few LUTs from my Voyager LUT pack , and they are already giving us a nice baseline level of color separation. These LUTs are basically pushing our cooler colors into the bottom end of our image while also pushing the warm colors into the top. If we look at the Vectorscope, we can see exactly how the LUT stretches our image colors out along the warm/cool axis. Without this overall look, we would have had to grade each individual shot to achieve the foundation.

You can use the slider to see how this LUT stretches the image colors along the warm/cool axis.

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