Adding tone with color grading

Changing lighting isn't the only way to convey a certain mood or tone in a scene. Like many modern movies, many games also use color grading to give a certain hue to everything in a scene. For instance, in a desert scene, color grading could be used to make everything appear yellowed under the harsh sun, or a mild blue grading could make a frozen tundra seem even colder.

If you've ever used Instagram, you can think of color grading like filters; the source image goes in and is then combined with the colors of the filter to give it an overall tone. In this section, we'll apply a few different color grading effects to our scene to get an understanding of what it can do.

The basics of color grading

Color grading is a post-processing effect, which means it comes into play after your scene has been projected and rasterized. Each pixel's color value is treated like a coordinate on a 2D map of all colors. Typically this coordinate is then passed to a custom map of different...