Color Correction Look Book: Creative Grading Techniques for Film and Video

Chapter 1. Working with Looks

Before diving into the wealth of techniques presented later in this book, it’s useful to consider what kind of thought goes into the heavy image manipulation of look development.

It’s a slippery slope from simply pushing the highlights of an image toward a warmer overall tone to creating a high-contrast skip-bleach simulation with an isolated cross-processing look in the highlights and a slight undertone in the shadows. Ultimately, the difference between a stylized grade and a look is imprecise and fungible. Perhaps the main difference is how much work you put into it. Perhaps the difference is how much of a change you’ve made from the original.

However you look at it, looks are visible stylizations of an image with ...