Colorist

A scene from an unidentified Wes Anderson film. This image was used to illustrate an article on what a colorist does to film. (The article did not specifically identify what had been done here.)

Broadly speaking, this is an artist who applies or manipulates the color of media.

In comic books, the original drawings were done in black-and-white, and a colorist then applied color to them. So the lines of the drawing and the color were done by two separate artists. (See a good example on the Wikipedia page for “Colorist.”) This article talks about some of the legendary comic book colorists and their impact.

In modern media, a colorist is someone who manipulates the color gradients of an image or video to achieve a desired affect. This process is called “color grading.”

In researching this, I realized that a lot of vivid and colorful images in films and TV shows (think Wes Anderson) were not anywhere close to that visual when filmed. An enormous amount of color is added in post-production.

One example was this clip from The Matrix where Neo’s office is shown in a shade of green. This was the work of a colorist – the scene as-filmed was likely quite normal.

Why I Looked It Up

I saw an Instagram video where someone was complaining about some of coloring on Breaking Bad. He used the term “colorist,” which confused me because I had only associated it with comic books.

I looked up his account, and he referred to himself as “Sr. Colorist/Founder at Qazi & Co.” and “Most followed colorist on IG.”

I visited his YouTube channel, and found a lot of informative videos that show how much influence a colorist has on video. In the videos, he refers to the final product as “a look,” and it usually differed remarkably from the original video or image.

This coincides with a video format I’ve seen on social channels every once in a while that overlays “everything you see on social media is fake, even the colors” and demonstrates some color grading of the video.