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
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.
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.
Clip-level grading for color separation
Now we can begin to grade on top of our overall look. Let’s go over to the Clip section of the node graph and work our way through it. First, we’ll navigate to the Exposure node and use the Offset wheel to tweak the overall levels. Then, in the Ratio node, we’ll control the Contrast and Pivot a bit.
This is starting to look pretty good. And here is our next opportunity to create some really good color separation in this image.
In the Balance node, color separation is the main thing I’m thinking about. You’ll often hear colorists talk about balancing in terms of “correcting” the image for neutral shadows and highlights. But for me, those things aren’t as important. My two key priorities when I’m in the Balance node are to make skin tones look great and to max out color separation. And you’re going to find that those two priorities often go hand in hand.
I’ll start by adjusting my Offset to try and max out our color separation. Offset is a great foundation for making balance adjustments. There’s a principle I always try to follow: Simplicity beats complexity and broad beats narrow. Offset is simple and broad. So if it gets the job done, that’s the tool you should use.
When it comes to introducing color separation, sometimes we can get more separation by working our Balance node with our Lift, Gamma, and Gain. To give you a sense for how this would work, I’m going to switch over to my Gain and warm things up. Then I’m going to switch back to Offset and cool the image off. That’s going to give me a little bit more color separation than I had a moment ago.
Don’t push things too far
It’s pretty easy to go too far when you start playing with your color separation like this. You want to make sure you’re not making your image look odd or unnatural. Just like everything in grading, you can push color separation too far, so be mindful of that.
But at the same time, don’t be afraid to experiment with Lift, Gamma, and Gain. Try them out and see if you can really max out and articulate the colors and hues within your images.
Using Secondaries for color separation
I think we’ve done a good job on our first image, but let’s do one more thing. Go down to the Secondaries branch of the node graph and flip the color space to HSV. Then set the Channels to Channel 2 only. That way, we’re only working on the “S” or the Saturation channel within this color model.
Now that our Channels are set up, let’s increase our Gamma and play the Gain against it to see if we can get more color separation. We’ll go a little bit too far on purpose to start, until our skin tones start to look a little strange. Then, we’ll go back to Offset and rebalance the image until everything starts looking good again.
Again, you want to be mindful that you’re not overcooking the grade. But if we’re trying to max out color separation, sometimes you have to push things too far and then back it off a little.
If you use the slider below, you can see just how far we’ve come simply by being mindful of color separation. And this is only our first pass. If we continue paying attention, we can find even more opportunities to introduce color separation throughout the rest of our grading process.
Use the slider above to compare our image before and after this color separation exercise.
Pay attention to your quadrants
Let’s move on to our next shot and see how we can improve on our color separation.
Let’s start the same way we began in our first example. First, set the exposure and contrast. (They’re both looking pretty good, honestly.) Then go over to the Balance node and work the Offset until things warm up a bit.
A good rule of thumb for introducing color separation is to make sure you are straddling at least two quadrants of your vectorscope with your signal mass. For example, look at what happens if I push the signal way up into a single quadrant.
We’ve got super low color separation, right? Everything in our image is now some flavor of yellow or red. But what happens if we adjust our signal mass until it’s living in two separate quadrants? There’s much more color separation now, right?
This image is another example where you can try to play your Gamma or Gain against your Offset adjustment to see what you can come up with. There’s no right or wrong way to do this. It’s something that you can experiment with until you get some interesting results.
Using saturation to increase color separation
Let’s move on to shot number three. The first thing I want to do to this image is increase its saturation.
I can do that by increasing the saturation in the Balance node. Then let’s compliment that by cooling things off a little bit using an Offset adjustment. Also, I feel like we could pair that Offset adjustment with a Gain or Gamma adjustment, so I’ll warm things up in the middle and then use Offset to cool it off again.
This image is really starting to pop now. Those Saturation, Offset, and Gamma adjustment are starting to create some nice color separation in the image. This is another good example of how we can prioritize color separation while we are working our way through a color grade.
Mixing Saturation and Balance
Let’s move to our fourth shot for one more example. As you can see, the exposure is a little off.
Just because we’re focused on color separation doesn’t mean we want to skip over the fundamentals. Let’s set this exposure to a healthier place so that we can see everything reasonably well.
Now that our exposure is set up, let’s try to get some more color separation by stealing the Saturation channel trick we used on our first image. We do that by navigating to our first shot, selecting the node we want to copy, and hitting command+C. Then we’ll navigate back to image number four, select that same Secondaries node, and use command+V to paste it on.
When you’re working with saturation, you’ll discover that the more you saturate, the more you’ll have to finesse your Balance. That’s because any imbalance is going to become really obvious when you increase your overall saturation.
In this example, let’s start by increasing our Gamma and our Gain using our new Saturation node. Then we can move over to our Balance node and cool things off a bit. We’ll move our colors a little bit away from the green side of things as well.
That’s starting to look nice. We’re definitely moving in the right direction.
Don’t forget to be messy
That’s how I go through the first pass of a color grade. I always stick to the fundamentals, but I also pay extra special attention to color separation.
Whether we’re talking about color separation specifically or color grading in general, you should always try to make a mess of your first pass. Throw some paint on the wall. Make your image look like a messy art studio! Don’t worry, you can always pull things back later. It’s always possible to reign in your color grades after that first pass.
My point is, if you don’t try things, you’ll never know if you could have done something interesting. For example, when I was working on our first image, I really overcooked the saturation. But I’m glad I went that far. I would rather go too far than not far enough. That’s because when you go too far, you create a boundary. Then you can pull back from that boundary and work on finding your sweet spot.
So, go wild! Discover your boundaries. Hopefully these examples will help you identify new opportunities to introduce color separation into your images.
