What Will Colour Grading Look Like in 2023?

Toby Tomkins

Founder and senior colourist at Cheat

Trend prediction will always be an exercise in glass ball gazing but there are a lot of interesting observations on grading trends to take into 2023. I'll start with a caveat on trends in colour grading; I can say with confidence that it’s hard to identify overarching trends across the whole gamut of the work that we do as colourists as our work is as varied as the photography and subject matter we work with.

Trends are speeding up and also diversifying into subsets, perhaps reflective of culture and the polarisation we’ve seen in recent years, but also due to the increase in speed and dissemination through the proliferation of social media and user generated content. The democratisation of ‘grading’ the look and editing of video has given access to millions of users worldwide to alter their video content to enhance the feeling and mood of their moving images (or leave it completely ‘bare’), with billions of eyes paying attention. Brands and agencies are hurriedly trying to compete with a new form of content that strives to achieve authenticity and realism or has a low-fi feel.

For those brands and creatives going against the grain of mass consumer media, some trends are continuing from the 2000s/2010s. Highly polished commercial work, where the high-end camera formats continue to excel in image quality and fidelity, are being combined with new approaches in look development. Advancements in grading and the tools we have available means we can now refine much smaller ranges of the images we work with and find a level of perfectionism through grading alone that was once a pipe dream.

Adding HDR (high dynamic range) presentation to the mix this year thanks to broad support on Instagram, YouTube, websites and mobile devices will push this forward with a bigger canvas (more tonality and more colours available) to better showcase this extended detail and information as we see fit. I can’t wait to grade more commercials in HDR and think it’s a great way forward to keep developing our craft. This might just be the biggest trend of 2023.

On the other side of the spectrum, there is beauty in the mundane with a demand for more authentic imagery. For me, it’s about keeping a level of ‘honesty’ to the imagery as if the light and subject were captured perfectly and 'displayed' in a way that feels natural. Achieving this beautiful naturalism is extremely hard, it’s something we see AI struggle with. Faking it is hard. For me, it’s about authenticity, not realism.

One evergreen trend in the era of digital video that I’ve always been fascinated about is film emulation. The past century of images acquired on film has left us with a subconscious relationship between the look of a film and the stories being told on screen. As digitally acquired images became the norm there was a split between filmmakers embracing the new digital realism (think Danny Boyle, Matt Reeves, Robert Rodriguez, Steven Soderberg), filmmakers sticking with film (think Paul Thomas Anderson, Chris Nolan, Quentin Tarantino) and everyone in between that either wanted to emulate film or borrow elements of the film aesthetic and transplant that onto their digital imagery. Looping back to the mainstream and user-generated content, it has been fascinating to see this approach become populated through filters and plugins for social media content and end users.

For me, there are a lot of parallels between a chef and a colourist and with all the trends around us, it’s important to make our mark with the ingredients we are given to stand out from the crowd. Everyone can cook, some are chefs and some of those chefs set trends. With the support of the Harbor colour science team, Cheat will be at the end of that spectrum in 2023, whatever the ingredients.

I believe we're entering a new era in digital colour grading, where having a unique personal style is more important than just following trends. When I started as a freelance colourist in 2013, DaVinci Resolve was just starting to become popular among independent colourists and we were all experimenting with the software to emulate the signature looks from big colour houses like Company 3 and The Mill. You could easily tell when a piece had been coloured at one of the big colour houses.

In the following years, many colour grading trends emerged, such as the low contrast look with lifted blacks and minimal saturation, the teal and orange look that simulated a Hollywood film when paired with anamorphic lens flares, the 16mm craze where we either graded 16mm film scans or made digital footage look like 16mm, and more recently the minimal phase where it's better to let the image breathe and not add too much of anything.

However, many young colourists have now learned Resolve inside and out, and colour grading is a well-understood craft even by clients and professionals outside of film. Following trends as a colourist is no longer enough to become relevant. In a very saturated market where independent colourists are not just emulating the big colour houses but also other freelance colourists they see on social media, it's important to find your own unique voice that sets you apart.

The trend towards minimalism in colour grading is likely to continue as influencer culture continues to expand and simple, mobile-generated videos remain popular. At the same time, we are also witnessing a surge of creativity thanks to AI platforms such as Midjourney and DALL-E, which can produce stunning images with just a text prompt. This revolution has the potential to inspire a move towards more vibrant and ultra-stylised content and could even change the way we work with colour. It's very possible that in the future, we may be relying on these AI systems to handle some or most of the colour grading process rather than moving all the pieces ourselves.