Decoding camera tech: Video colour settings

From faded vintage hues that suggest nostalgia to cool blues that create a serene mood, colour is a powerful storytelling device in video. Whether you're shooting social videos, a family home movie or a YouTube epic, you can use colour to visually communicate emotion, influence how your audience feels and draw their attention to important details.

Travel filmmaker Giulia Gartner uses light and colour to channel the emotional tone of her films. Her short documentary about a parkour athlete in Portugal, shot on a Canon EOS R6 V, is a good example. The dynamic moves of her subject drive the story forward, but it's her considered use of the colour of 'blue hour' that underpins the more reflective side of Luís's life story.

"Those deep blue tones have so much emotion and I love playing with that," Giulia says. "Especially when parts in the story feel more personal. You can use those darker tones to set the mood, and also add colour contrast – like cutting from a dark, blue-hour scene to a sunrise."

Canon cameras offer a range of ways to manage colours and give your footage a distinctive look and feel – from Picture Styles presets to Custom Picture files that let you decide on a final look later, when you edit your film.

The EOS R6 V and EOS R50 V are cameras designed with video recording in mind, and both feature a shortcut button that takes you directly to Colour Mode. This lets you access all the main colour tools in one place: Picture Style, Custom Picture and the Colour Filter option, which offers a range of expressive effects.

You may be familiar with Picture Styles, which can be applied to images as well as video clips. They are presets that offer different combinations of customisable characteristics, such as colour, contrast and sharpness. For example, the Portrait Picture style has reduced sharpness for softer skin tones, while the Landscape Picture Style is sharper, with more vivid blues and greens to complement outdoor scenes.

You can adjust each parameter to create a more distinctive look and feel, or create your own Picture Styles from scratch. Unless you’re recording RAW video, the Picture Style is applied to your footage when you start recording, just like white balance and exposure. This means it’s important to choose the right setting before you shoot.

Custom Picture files apply a combination of settings, such as colour space, colour matrix and look files (more on those later). Unlike the Picture Style and Colour Filter settings, which bake a specific look into your footage, clips recorded with a Custom Picture file usually require post-processing to produce a finished video. Some Custom Picture files produce ready-to-view footage straight from the camera. For example, Canon 709 does not require post-processing, while Canon Log 2 and Canon Log 3 do. Canon Log gives you greater control over the final look during editing, though.

Canon Log records footage with low contrast and muted colours so that it preserves more detail in bright highlights and dark shadows than standard video settings.

Don't worry if your Canon Log video seems dull and lifeless when you view it – that's how it's meant to look. Not only does this make it easier to use colour correction to remove colour casts and make your footage appear natural, but you can also get creative with colour grading.

Another feature that makes Canon Log so useful is the consistency it offers when you're combining clips shot on different cameras. It lets you start from a similar base and grade the footage in the same way – which is particularly useful for content creators working with multiple cameras, whether you’re filming a YouTube video, social content or a larger project.

Some professional filmmakers prefer Canon Log 2 as it captures a wider dynamic range and more shadow detail than Canon Log 3, although it can take longer to process to achieve the best results. Canon Log 3 is quicker and easier to grade, making it a great choice for everyday shooting where you still want flexibility in the edit.

Canon Log 3 is available on a wide range of EOS R System cameras, including the EOS R7, EOS R8 and EOS R50 V, while the EOS R6 V and other selected cameras also offer Canon Log 2.

Canon Log footage will appear flat and low-contrast as you record it. Enabling View Assist, available on compatible cameras, gives you a more natural-looking preview of your footage while leaving your original Log footage untouched. It gives you the best of both worlds: a more useful in-camera view that helps you judge exposure, colour and composition, while still allowing you to make the most of the extra shadow detail and flexibility of a Log file when it comes to processing your footage.

Colour correction is all about balancing footage and making it look technically correct, providing a starting point for any creative adjustments. You might remove a blue or orange colour cast, for example, or make skin tones look natural and fix exposure or contrast problems. A colour-corrected video should generally look ‘normal’.

Colour grading is where you get creative and add character. It’s all about giving your video a specific look or style – be it warm, nostalgic, gritty or high-contrast. It is a similar to manipulating a photo, where colour, contrast and tones are altered in post-production to create a particular mood. You might want to add a cinematic teal-and-orange grade by pushing the shadows towards blue-green and making highlights and skin tones warmer, for example, or desaturate the video for dramatic effect. You can colour grade manually or apply a LUT to quickly add a particular look or mood (more on LUTs below).

If you're going to grade your video, then it's better to start with RAW video or flat-looking Log footage, as both preserve more image data for adjustments later. Shooting RAW video offers the greatest flexibility, allowing you to adjust colour temperature, exposure and many other parameters as if you were changing them in-camera. The trade-off is that RAW video can fill memory cards quickly and it demands more computing power to turn the raw sensor data into a viewable video file.

The Canon EOS R6 V and several other EOS cameras are also compatible with LUT (Look-up Table) files, which can be loaded into the camera and registered as look files in the Custom Picture menu. These files are essentially preset colour grades, making it easy to create a specific look without having to adjust colour and contrast settings individually. LUT files can also be applied in advanced editing software, so the in-camera preview and your final video will closely match.

If you want to give your content a consistent finish, try using the same LUT across a series of videos. It's a simple way to develop a recognisable visual style while speeding up your editing workflow.

Explore the Canon LUT library to learn more about LUTs and download a range of creative looks, including Bleach Bypass, High Key and Faded Sepia.

Even if you're not shooting RAW or Canon Log, Canon's colour science makes it easier to match footage shot on different EOS cameras. Canon lenses, camera image sensors and DIGIC X processors work in harmony to produce colours that are consistent, rich yet natural, with warm, flattering skin tones, so your footage looks great straight from the camera.

"I'm someone who loves expressing myself with colours," says Giulia Gartner, who shoots most of her projects in Canon Log 2. "It's one of the main reasons I love using Canon because the colour science really fits my style of filmmaking. Colour is such an important part of my creative expression."

Whether you prefer colours that are true to life or more stylised, knowing when to use creative tools such as Picture Styles, Canon Log and LUTs will give you more control over the final look of your videos. It isn’t about changing the look of your footage for the sake of it, though. It’s about telling your story in the way you want.

• Fast turnaround: Picture Style or Colour Filter
• Minor editing: Custom Picture or Canon Log 3
• Advanced grading: Canon Log 2 or RAW
• Consistent visual brand: Use the same LUT across a video series

Written by Marcus Hawkins