How to Give Your Videos a Filmic Look With Color Grading

There are many ways to edit your videos and images, but one lasting method is in fact just to mimic the past. In this video, watch how one videographer color grades his work to get that vintage feel without sacrificing quality.

It's funny how circular anything to do with taste is. Something becomes popular through whim or necessity until the masses grow tired of it, then typically, a trend rises in direct opposition of it, rinse and repeat. My girlfriend is a fashion designer, so I see a lot of trend boards and get some second-hand knowledge of the industry. It has prompted the realization of how trends just spawn out of opposition for previous trends. For example, tight-fitting, skinny clothes were the go-to garments for the best part of a decade or more, now we're back to the looser fits of the 90s like baggier jeans, which the skinny jeans set themselves in opposition to in the first place.

Photography and videography are rarely different to this cyclical nature, particularly when it comes to post-processing, but more trends are born of necessity. Many of the popular characteristics of film ā€” grain, contrast, color-casts ā€” were seen as unwanted and unfortunate. Now, we have such incredible accuracy of color and clarity of picture, we yearn for the character of old, and so we add it back in post.

Vuhlandes is one of my favorite content creators and his love of film and its aesthetic give his videos a lot of character. In this video, he breaks down how he adds that.

Rob Baggs's picture

Robert K Baggs is a professional portrait and commercial photographer, educator, and consultant from England. Robert has a First-Class degree in Philosophy and a Master's by Research. In 2015 Robert's work on plagiarism in photography was published as part of several universities' photography degree syllabuses.

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4 Comments

"Filmic" I hope this isn't going to be a new phrase...If is does become one, can I refer to work as "digitalic"? And since these are cycles, can I start making photographs black and white with extra soft focus and selective color?