Advanced colour correction

In their most basic form, colour correction tools enable you to make your whites look white and your blacks look black, so that everything appears 'normal'.

If you shoot a sequence over an hour as the sun's going down, with changes in colour temperature you can make everything look like it was shot in one go. Colour grading can also be a creative tool, and digital colour grading has seen the process pushed to exciting new limits over recent years.

Films such as The Lord of The Rings and Amlie have used deep colour grading to create mood, or to let the viewer know what part of the movie's world they are in.

In this tutorial, you'll use After Effects to add a rich colour grade to a piece of moving footage. Colour grading usually goes wrong when people apply one tint or change one colour, so here you'll learn how to achieve a convincing appearance by working on foreground and background separately.

The clip used was shot on a dull day, and will be made golden and bright to create a dreamlike feel. The sculpture/bench in the centre will retain its normal lighting, to make it stand out.

Click here to download the tutorial for free