Grading looks like a skill and is mostly a sequence. Done in the right order, four of the five steps have correct answers, and the creative part shrinks to a decision that takes minutes.
Done in the wrong order, all five feel like taste, none of them settles, and you spend an evening moving sliders back and forth.
The five steps
| Step | Technical or taste | Judged by |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Out of log | Technical | The camera profile |
| 2. Exposure | Technical | Waveform |
| 3. White balance | Technical | Vectorscope, neutral objects |
| 4. Match clips | Technical | A reference clip |
| 5. The look | Taste | Your eyes |
Everything above the line is correction; the last row is grading. Mixing them is the usual cause of an evening lost.
1. Out of log
If you shot log — S-Log3, D-Log, C-Log, V-Log — the footage is deliberately flat and low contrast to preserve range. It is not a look and it is not broken; it is a container.
Converting out of it is a fixed transform for your camera, not a judgement. S-Log3 to Rec.709 and D-Log to Rec.709 are the two most common; the principle is the same for all of them. Do this before anything else, because every later decision is made through it.
If you shot standard profile, skip this step entirely.
2. Exposure
Set midtones where they belong and stop. Use the waveform, not your monitor — your eyes adapt within seconds and your monitor is probably not calibrated.
Rough targets: skin around 60–70 on the waveform, highlights short of clipping, blacks touching the bottom without crushing. These are starting points, not rules.
3. White balance
Neutral should read neutral. Find something in the frame that is genuinely grey or white and make it so.
This is the step that matters most across a shoot, because white balance drifts — between the morning and the afternoon, between indoors and out, and between two cameras that disagree about what daylight is.
4. Match everything to one clip
Pick the clip that is closest to right and make the others agree with it. Not with your memory — with it, on screen, side by side.
This is the step people skip and the reason a look lands differently on every shot. A grade cannot hide a mismatch; it magnifies one.
5. Then the look
Now, and only now, apply the creative decision. Usually one LUT and a small adjustment. What is a LUT is the mechanism and free LUTs is where usable ones come from.
If step five is taking a long time, the problem is almost always that steps two to four were not finished.
What to leave alone
- Saturation, mostly. Raise contrast first and most footage stops looking flat without touching it.
- Individual colour channels, until the basics are done.
- Sharpening. Not grading, and it does not fix soft footage.
- Per-clip creative decisions. One look across the piece is what makes it read as a piece.
Where the time actually goes
Not in step five. In steps three and four, repeated across every clip on the timeline — which is mechanical work with a correct answer, done by hand, forty times.
That is the part worth automating, and the part colour grading software differs most in.
How BatchTone handles it
Steps one to four, across a folder, from the camera profile rather than by eye. Drop the card in, pick the conversion, and every clip takes it identically — with a frame pulled from each so you can see the whole shoot agreeing before anything creative happens.
- Exposure offset per clip for the shots that need less.
- The creative LUT on top, the same for everything by default.
- Audio copied across untouched.
- Originals never written to.
The judgement in step five stays yours; the four steps before it are the ones that are the same every time. There is a seven-day trial.
Common questions
What order should I colour grade in? Out of log, exposure, white balance, match clips, then the look. The first four have correct answers; only the last is taste.
Do I need scopes to grade? For exposure, white balance and matching, yes. Eyes adapt and monitors lie. For the creative decision, no.
How long should grading take? Minutes per clip for correction and one decision for the whole piece. If the look is taking hours, correction was not finished.
Should I grade every clip differently? No. Correct each clip individually, then apply one look to all of them. Varying the look per clip is what makes a sequence feel disjointed.
Is colour grading necessary if I shot in a standard profile? Less of it. You can skip the log conversion, and exposure, white balance and matching still apply.