These two words get used interchangeably and they are two different jobs, done in a fixed order, with different tools and different success criteria. Knowing which one you are doing is most of what separates footage that holds together from footage that does not.
The two jobs
| Correction | Grading | |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Accurate | Intentional |
| Judged by | Scopes | Your eyes |
| Right answer | There is one | There is not |
| Per clip | Yes, individually | Usually once, across all |
| Skippable | No | Yes |
Correction is fixing what the camera got wrong or could not know. White balance that drifted between the morning and the afternoon, exposure that moved when a cloud passed, two cameras that disagree about what neutral looks like. It has a correct answer and you can verify it on a scope.
Grading is deciding what the footage should feel like. Warmer, cooler, crushed blacks, lifted shadows, a particular film emulation. There is no correct answer, only a choice, and it is applied on top of corrected footage.
Why the order is not negotiable
A look is a transformation. Apply it to two clips that disagree and you get two clips that disagree, transformed — often more visibly than before, because a strong grade exaggerates the difference rather than covering it.
This is the single most common reason a LUT that looked wonderful on the clip you tested it on looks wrong across the rest of the shoot. The LUT is fine. The footage underneath it was never matched.
What correction actually involves
Four things, in this order:
- Exposure. Get the midtones where they belong. A shot that was two stops under is not fixed by brightening it later; it is fixed by grading from a sensible starting point and accepting the noise.
- White balance. Neutral should be neutral. This is where the two-camera problem lives.
- Contrast and levels. Blacks at black, whites not clipping.
- Matching. Every clip against a chosen reference clip, not against your memory of the room.
For log footage there is a step before all of it — converting out of log, which is a technical transform rather than a grade. S-Log3 to Rec.709 and D-Log to Rec.709 are that step for two common cameras, and the distinction matters here: that conversion is correction, not look.
What grading involves
Much less than people expect, once correction is done properly.
Often a single LUT and a couple of adjustments. The reason it feels harder is that people are trying to grade their way out of a correction problem — fighting a colour cast with a creative tool, which never quite works and takes all evening.
What is a LUT covers the mechanism; free LUTs covers where usable ones come from. The important point here is that a creative LUT expects corrected input and a conversion LUT expects log. Feeding the wrong one the wrong footage is the other half of why results look strange.
Where it goes wrong on a real shoot
- Grading clip one, then applying it to clip forty. Correction was never done, so the look lands differently on every shot.
- Correcting with a creative LUT. It changes the colour relationships, so your white balance judgement is now being made through a filter.
- Matching by memory. Put the reference clip on screen next to the one you are matching. Every time.
- Doing both at once, per clip. Slow, and it guarantees drift across a long timeline.
How BatchTone handles it
The separation is the point. Drop a folder in and the conversion out of log — the correction half — is applied to every clip identically, from the camera profile rather than by eye. A frame is pulled from each clip and previewed with it applied, so you can see the whole shoot agreeing before anything creative happens.
- Exposure offset per clip, for the shots that need less, without touching the rest.
- The creative LUT, if you want one, sits on top of that and is the same for every clip by default.
- Originals are never written to.
Correction across a folder is the part that is mechanical and therefore worth automating; the look is the part worth your judgement. There is a seven-day trial if you want to see it against your own footage.
Common questions
Which comes first, colour correction or colour grading? Correction, always. A grade applied to unmatched footage exaggerates the mismatch rather than hiding it.
Can I skip colour correction? Only if the footage was shot in consistent light on one camera and exposed correctly. That is rarer than it sounds, and it is the situation in which a LUT appears to work perfectly.
Is a LUT correction or grading? Either, and they are different files. A conversion LUT that takes log to Rec.709 is correction. A creative LUT that adds a look is grading. Applying them in the wrong order gives strange results.
Do I need scopes? For correction, yes — eyes adapt and monitors lie. For grading, no; that part is a judgement and scopes cannot make it for you.
Why does my grade look different on every clip? Because correction was skipped. The look is doing its job; the footage underneath it does not match.