What does color grading involve in video editing?

Color grading involves adjusting the color and tone of video footage to enhance its visual quality and meet the desired aesthetic or narrative mood of the project. This process includes correcting color imbalances, enhancing contrast, and modifying brightness levels while also applying creative color effects that can radically change the look and feel of the video.

By manipulating these elements, color grading contributes to storytelling by evoking different emotions, guiding viewer perception, and maintaining consistency throughout the project. For instance, a warm color palette might create a cozy atmosphere, while cooler tones might evoke a more somber or dramatic tone.

In contrast, creating a script pertains to the pre-production stage and involves writing the content and dialogue before filming. Adding sound effects relates to the post-production audio mixing process rather than visual manipulation, while performing video compression focuses on reducing file size for easier distribution and is unrelated to adjusting visual elements. These processes serve different purposes in video production and editing, highlighting the specific nature of color grading within the overall editing workflow.