Evernote for color grading ideas

Yesterday we talked about using Evernote to catalog inspiration and images. Here’s another use I’ve found much along the same lines. As our department grows I find it is useful for me to have visual examples at my fingertips for various things. If I’m looking for a particular look and feel (ie. color grading) in a video piece rather than say “oh, you know, I like the dark tones with a hint of purple and some glows in the red channel and some grain but not too much,” I would rather have a visible example to work from.

Enter Evernote.

Step one, use yesterday’s technique and create an note called “Grading” in your “Ideas” notebook.

Every time you come across an image in your web browsing that catches your attention drag it into that notebook. Done, saved, references are always available. You could get advanced and starting creating various notebooks for different moods, “Grading – cool,” “Grading – warm,” “Grading – sepias,” you get the idea.

And just for fun, here’s a cool way to implement this color grading technique into Photoshop. There’s no easy way to do this in After Effects, but you could render a JPEG sequence and create an automated action to process each frame. Or you could just learn to master color grading in AE to get a similar look.

The Match Color tool can be used to treat one image to look like the colors from another image. This tutorial explains how it works. Where we add to the technique is that you can literally drag a photo out of Evernote and directly into Photoshop making it available for the Match Color tool to use.