Colour grading for beginners: looks, LUTs and scopes in Sharpy

What is the difference between colour correction and colour grading?

Colour correction makes the picture right; colour grading makes it feel a certain way. Correction fixes what the camera got wrong. Grading comes after, and it is a choice: warm and nostalgic, cool and clinical, faded like film.

The order matters because a look is built for a balanced picture. Lay a warm look over a shot that is already orange and you get orange skin, not warmth.

Colour grading for beginners: how do you grade a video?

Work in the order colourists use, one pass at a time. Sharpy grades in the same fixed order, so a creative look never goes on before the picture is balanced.

1. Set the exposure in the Clip tab, watching the waveform, until nothing important is crushed to black or clipped to white.
2. Balance the colour. Bring something neutral, a white wall or a grey shirt, to level red, green and blue on the RGB parade with the wheels' warmth and tint, or click it on the picture and Sharpy sets the balance from it.
3. Set the contrast. Sharpy's tone controls work on brightness alone, so adding contrast never makes skin more saturated.
4. Match the shots. Bring every clip to your main shot, usually the talking head, before any look goes on.
5. Add the look. Now the mood: a look from the shelf, a LUT, or both.
6. Fix skin and single colours. Quiet an orange face or deepen a pale sky.
7. Check the finished frames with and without the grade.

How do you read the four scopes?

Your eyes adapt to whatever is on screen; a scope does not. Sharpy's Scope tab holds the four a colourist reads, and all four read the same frame, so two can never disagree.

Sharpy's vectorscope stays square whatever the panel's shape, so every hue sits at its true angle, and it carries the skin line. False colour and zebras sit beside the four for exposure.

How do you choose and stack looks in Sharpy?

Looks live in the Look tab as tiles drawn from your own frame: cinematic, warm, cool, matte, vivid, mono, vintage and more. No look on the shelf clips white.

1. Select what to grade. A clip, several clips, a track, or nothing for the whole edit. The Look tab's heading names where a look lands: "on the whole edit", "on 3 clips", "track P1".
2. Try looks while it plays. Rest the pointer on a tile and the viewer shows that look at once, even during playback.
3. Click to keep one. Each click is one step you can undo.
4. Stack and trim. Up to four looks stack on a clip, its own and then its track's. The Clip tab lists them in order, each with a strength slider, an eye that switches it off and keeps its settings, and a handle to reorder.
5. Compare. ⌃⇧L shows the picture without its looks and ⌃⇧B a before-and-after split. Neither is recorded.
6. Grade a stretch. Mark In and Out and press ⌥A for an adjustment clip: a grade over everything beneath it for its length. ⌃⌥A adds an adjustment track.

The agent does the same from Claude or Codex in plain words: "the B-roll is matte", "grade the middle minute".

Which instruments and LUTs can you grade with?

Twelve instruments sit behind the looks, each as sliders that explain themselves on hover and preview while you hold them. They start neutral, so add one and move it.

• Colour wheels and levels: lift, gamma, gain and offset, each with a master, warmth and tint; black point, white point and midpoint.
• Curves: a tone curve with four handles; hue and saturation curves at eight named hues, including orange, where skin sits; and red, green, blue and luma curves.
• Hue-saturation: saturation aimed at one hue, such as "take the orange out of the skin".
• Film behaviour and vignette: colour that lets go in the highlights, saturated colours made darker, and darker corners.
• Qualifier: limits any look to a range of hue, colourfulness and lightness, with soft edges, so you can deepen only the sky. Sharpy tells you how much of the picture it takes before you use it.

For a LUT, choose File ▸ Grade Through a Lookup Table… and pick a .cube file. It goes over the whole edit, after every look, and the GRADE section of the Look tab names it, with Change and Off. Sharpy tells you in words what it does, and the viewer matches the export byte for byte. What a LUT is explains camera LUTs and creative ones.

How do you keep skin tones true while you grade?

Grade the room, not the person. Every look has a reach: the whole picture, around the person, or the person alone. Moods such as cinematic, warm and cool go around the person by default; styles such as mono and matte, and the instruments, cover the whole picture. No green screen is needed: Sharpy finds the person in every frame on your Mac.

The difference is measurable. On a test recording, the mono look laid over the whole picture moved the speaker's skin by 16 on the ΔE2000 scale, where about 1 is the smallest difference most people can see. Laid around the person, the moods moved it by less than 0.1.

Every colour change also reports what it did to the face, and at 1 or more Sharpy warns that anyone will see it. A grade that looked plainly wrong on review moved the face by 5.53. There is no one right number for skin: Sharpy reads each face against its own complexion and leaves it alone when it is already right.

How do you match shots and check the grade before export?

Match before you add a look. Ask Sharpy to read a clip's colour and it measures brightness, balance and colourfulness in the shadows, middle and highlights. Ask it to match one shot to another, "make the B-roll at 12 seconds sit with the recording at 40", and the reply says how much of each gap closed. Ask which clip does not sit, and it names each one that is visibly out, worst first, with the change that brings it in. How to colour match video clips goes through it.

Before you export:

• Switch the looks off and on with ⌃⇧L, to be sure the grade still helps.
• Read the finished frames. Sharpy measures what the viewer is shown, every layer, look and LUT, including the share of pixels crushed to black or clipped to white.
• Trust the viewer. It shows a frame as the Mac's own players show the exported file, and an ungraded clip comes out exactly as it went in.

Then export the finished video.

Frequently asked questions

01

Is color grading hard for beginners?

Less than it looks, if you keep to the order: exposure, balance, contrast, matching, then a look. The scopes tell you when something is wrong before your eyes adjust to it, and Sharpy's looks keep skin true by default.

02

Do I need a LUT to colour grade?

No. A LUT is one way to apply a look. For log footage, a camera LUT is the usual first step; for anything else, Sharpy's looks and instruments do the same job with more control.

03

Should I colour grade before or after editing?

After the cut is close to final, because a grade belongs to its shots. In Sharpy a grade on an adjustment clip stays over its material when the cut changes around it.

04

Does grading change my original files?

No. The grade lives in the edit, and switching a look off keeps its settings, so you can always go back to the picture as it was shot.