Learn the art of color grading — the final craft that turns flat, raw clips into the rich, emotional images Nepal’s best films and ads are made of.
Explore the courseColor grading is the difference between footage and a film. It’s the final stage of post-production where a colorist shapes every frame — balancing exposure, perfecting skin tones, and building a look that carries the mood of the whole story. A wedding feels warm and golden, a music video cold and electric, a brand film clean and confident. None of that is an accident; it’s graded.
There’s a craft people confuse into one word. Color correction is technical — fixing exposure and white balance so an image looks right. Color grading is creative — deciding how an image should feel. You’ll learn both, because you can’t do the art until you’ve mastered the fix.
It’s also the most under-taught skill in Nepal. Plenty of people can edit; very few can grade well. That scarcity is exactly why a trained colorist is one of the most valued people on any project here.
You’ll train your eye and your hands together — on real, ungraded footage, until reading and shaping an image becomes instinct.
Training your eye to actually read an image — what’s wrong, what’s missing, and what a shot wants to feel like. The skill everything else rests on.
Balancing exposure, contrast and white balance to a clean, neutral base — using scopes, not guesswork, so your foundation is right every time.
Creative grading — shaping mood and story through color, building looks for weddings, music videos and ads that feel intentional, not filtered.
Getting skin tones right for Nepali faces, and using qualifiers and power windows to grade one part of the frame without touching the rest.
Matching shots across a scene — different cameras, different light — so a finished film feels like one continuous piece.
Working with LUTs sensibly, saving and reusing looks, and delivering a graded master that holds up on every screen a client will watch it on.
You’ll grade in DaVinci Resolve, the industry standard for color and the tool Nepal’s production houses finish on. You’ll live on its node-based Color page — primaries, secondaries, curves, scopes and tracking — and learn to drive it with the confidence of a working colorist. If you want the whole application, our dedicated Resolve course covers editing, audio and delivery too; this course is about the grade itself.
Grading doesn’t happen in isolation, so you’ll also learn where it sits in the pipeline — how an edit hands off to the grade, and how choices made on set in cinematography (exposure, lighting, lens) make a colorist’s job easy or impossible. Understanding both ends makes you far better at the middle.
You can’t learn color from theory slides. You learn it by grading real footage — flat, log clips from actual Nepali weddings, music videos and brand shoots, with all their difficult light and mixed cameras.
So that’s what you grade, with a mentor beside you: rescuing an underexposed ceremony, warming a cold reception, matching a drone shot to a gimbal shot, building a look a client falls in love with. You learn to trust the scopes, to grade on a deadline, and to know when a shot is finished instead of fiddling forever.
You leave with a before-and-after showreel — flat clip beside finished grade, scene after scene. It’s the single most convincing thing a colorist can put in front of a studio, and you’ll have one.
Along the way you’ll build the habits that make grading sustainable as paid work: a clean node structure others can read, saved looks you can reuse across a project, and a calm, methodical order of operations so a twenty-minute wedding film doesn’t become a week of second-guessing. Speed and consistency are what turn a talented eye into a working colorist.
Because trained colorists are so rare in Nepal, the work is steady and the rates are good. With this skill you can:
“Colorist” is one of the least crowded and best-paid roles in Nepal’s creative industry — precisely because so few people can do it well.
This course is for anyone who looks at a film and feels its color before they can explain it. Editors come to add the finishing skill that sets their work apart. Video editors and Premiere users come to stop handing grades to someone else. Photographers and cinematographers come because understanding color deepens everything they shoot. And complete beginners with a strong visual instinct come because grading rewards the eye more than the résumé. You don’t need years of experience — you need to care how an image feels, and the patience to train for it.
Color is taught almost everywhere as a list of sliders. We teach it as seeing — the only way it actually sticks.
Grading is personal. Your mentor sits at your station, looks at your image with you, and shows you what your eye keeps missing.
You grade real, flat clips from actual Nepali shoots — and finish with before-and-after work you can show any studio.
People who grade real projects for a living, teaching the judgement that only real client deadlines build.
Top graduates get placed into real finishing work; committed students get referred to houses that need color skills.
The same philosophy runs through everything we do — read more about OFI and our other courses.
The Resolve course teaches the whole application — editing, color, audio, delivery. This course goes deep on the art and craft of the grade itself, the colorist’s eye. They complement each other.
It helps but isn’t required. If you want a foundation in cutting, our video editing course pairs naturally with this one.
No. Correction fixes an image so it looks right; grading shapes how it feels. You’ll learn correction first, then the creative grading that builds a look.
You’ll work on our calibrated setup in class. We’ll explain what matters in a grading setup — and how to start on a realistic budget — before you invest in your own.
Yes, and a scarce one. Production houses, wedding studios and agencies all need grading, and trained colorists are hard to find — which keeps the work steady and the rates strong.
Both, and that’s the appeal. The scopes and tools are technical; the decisions are creative. We teach you to be confident with both.
Colour grading at OFI is led by David, our DaVinci Resolve and colour grading instructor. Colour is the most instinct-driven craft in post-production, and instinct is built fastest under someone who already has it. David grades real client work, and he brings those projects, problems and standards straight into the classroom.
His teaching method is simple and relentless: read the scopes, trust the scopes, then make the image feel right. Students grade the same footage repeatedly — first to match, then to correct, then to create a look — while he reviews every version and explains not just what is wrong but why your eye missed it.
Small batches mean every student’s work gets screened and discussed. Watching your grade critiqued next to a classmate’s is uncomfortable for a week and invaluable for a career.
Good colourists do not guess — they measure. You will learn to read waveform, vectorscope and histogram the way a musician reads notes, so exposure and colour balance become objective decisions instead of hopeful sliders. From there the course covers primary correction, secondary correction, qualifiers, power windows, tracking and node-based grade structure.
LUTs are demystified too: what they actually are, when they help, when they quietly ruin footage, and how to build your own looks instead of depending on downloads. You will grade log footage from real cameras and learn how colour spaces and transforms fit together in a modern pipeline.
The result is a skill that is rare in Nepal. Editors are common; genuine colourists are not — and rooms notice the difference the moment a graded film plays.
Every genre pays for colour differently. Wedding films sell warmth and skin tones; ads sell punch and product accuracy; music videos sell style; documentaries sell honesty. The course teaches you to grade for intent, so you can move between genres and always know what the image is supposed to feel like.
You will build consistent looks across full projects — not one pretty frame, but ninety shots that hold together on a phone screen, a laptop and a projector. Client-proofing your grade like that is precisely the skill studios struggle to find.
Graduates leave with graded work in their showreel and the vocabulary to discuss colour with directors and clients — which is often what wins the job before the grade even begins.
Nepal has plenty of editors and almost no trained colorists. Become the person studios call when footage needs to look like a film.
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