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How do you learn to color grade?

I know it's a very very dense discipline, but I was wondering where do I start if I want to learn how to color grade a film? Any highly recommended books or videos?

I heard about "The Tao of Color", but it seems to apply only to people grading on DaVinci Resolve, which I can far from afford. I was considering coloring with FCPX or getting After Effects, which I've heard people can do a pretty good job of coloring with. But I'm green as can be. Can anybody offer up any advice?
 
Resolve is largely based on the three wheel system, so most of it would be applicable with any similar setup whether Apple's color, or Adobe's products. Colorista provides a pretty similar interface I think.

Ultimately what you want to learn is the actual theory and what each adjustment does to the overall image, then the same things can be done in pretty much any package, regardless of the interface. There are really only a handful of things that you adjust when doing color grading, those in conjunction with masks (aka "power windows" in some grading packages) get you all of the power you really need.
 
FXPHD has a course that focuses on the craft of color grading rather than a specific tool - it's not as cheap as a book ($360 for a 12 week course) but that's for an actual course with instructor and community feedback on the work you're doing. I think you also get three courses for the same price, so if they've got other stuff you're interested in learning it's actually a pretty good deal.
 
If you own an iPad, you can check this out:

http://www.dalegrahncolor.com/

It's $4 or so. In case you don't know who Dale Grahn is, he has a fair bit of Colour Timer experience:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0334391/

I don't own anything Apple, so I haven't been able to try it, but it looks good. I liked the "old school" nature of it, and feel despite the whole digital "anything goes" capabilities, I'd love to really focus on what made a great colour timer with actual film.

CraigL
 
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FXPHD has a course that focuses on the craft of color grading rather than a specific tool - it's not as cheap as a book ($360 for a 12 week course) but that's for an actual course with instructor and community feedback on the work you're doing. I think you also get three courses for the same price, so if they've got other stuff you're interested in learning it's actually a pretty good deal.

Having formerly done 3 semesters of FXPHD, I can attest to its awesomeness. If you can manage to scrape together the cash, it's certainly worthwhile.

For their courses on some of the higher end software (massive, nuke, fusion, etc) they include access to the software via vpn during the semester too so you get hands-on training on software you might not otherwise have access to.
 
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