Two Different Goals, One Editing Session
Colour correction and colour grading serve entirely different purposes. Confusing them leads to images that look stylised but feel wrong, or technically accurate images that lack personality. Understanding the distinction is the foundation of consistent, professional post-processing.
What Is Colour Correction?
Colour correction makes an image look accurate. The goal is technical correctness: white balance adjusted so white objects look white, exposure placed so scene brightness matches perception, skin tones in a believable range, lens chromatic aberration removed, and colour casts from mixed light sources neutralised. Colour correction has objectively correct answers based on physics and human perception. You correct before you grade, always.
What Is Colour Grading?
Colour grading is the creative layer applied on top of a corrected image. It introduces stylistic intent: warm amber highlights and cool teal shadows for a cinematic look, lifted blacks and reduced saturation for a faded film aesthetic, or enhanced greens and desaturated reds for a moody outdoor portrait. Grading is subjective. Different photographers applying different grades to the same corrected image will produce different results, and both can be correct if they serve the creative vision.
The Workflow Order
- Cull your images first using imagic to select only your technically strongest frames
- Apply colour correction: white balance, exposure, lens corrections
- Apply base colour grading: your signature look
- Fine-tune individual images where lighting deviated from the reference
Common Mistakes
Grading without correcting locks colour casts into the stylistic treatment. The grade will look inconsistent across a shoot because each image starts from a different uncorrected baseline.
Skipping grading entirely leaves technically correct but emotionally flat images. Grading is where your photographic style lives; do not omit it.
Tools for Correction and Grading
Both darktable and RawTherapee provide excellent correction and grading tools at no cost. After culling your selects with imagic (install via pip install imagic), open them in darktable's colour balance RGB module for grading or RawTherapee's colour toning panel for a complete free correction and grading pipeline.