How to Best Bring Out the Colors in Your Video

With thousands of videos uploaded to YouTube every day, you’ll want to make yours stand out. Here are some tips to help best bring out the colors in your video.

Learn your color theory basics

You’ve likely heard of the color wheel, and maybe concepts such as color harmony. You’re also likely familiar with colors associating with different emotions: red with anger, blue with calmness, green with envy, and so on.

Some of the concepts of theory were first developed in the Renaissance by artists like Leonardo da Vinci. Later, Isaac Newton created the first color wheel (what didn’t that guy do?), which shows the relationship between colors and how they can be mixed to create new ones.

Modern color wheels incorporate RGB (red, green, blue) and CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) color models. You’ve likely seen these acronyms if you’ve used apps like Photoshop.

Centuries later, these concepts and principles are useful to YouTubers. Think about your favorite channel’s thumbnails and why they catch your eye. A thumbnail for a subject that’s meant to be exciting will likely use opposite colors, or near opposites like blue and yellow.

Color theory is also important for your branding and identity. Your videos should use a consistent color palette so users can easily recognise your content. It’s also an important tool for set design: the right background is more likely to keep people’s attention than a plain white wall, which brings us to the next tip.

Get the right background

Particularly important for videos like static vlogs, where you might be sitting at your desk or on the couch, the right background can keep a viewer engaged, or mean they flick to something else.

Popular music critic Anthony Fantano is well-known for using the covers of albums he’s reviewing in the background. These artworks have themselves often been chosen to stand out from other covers.


Your knowledge of color theory will help you understand what kind of background catches the eye. It’s a good idea to watch some of the biggest YouTubers and check out the sort of backgrounds they’re using.

Get your camera settings right

First off, you’ll want to make sure your camera shoots in good quality: aim for at least a 1080p (HD) resolution, and if you can, use 4K.

The right white balance so you can avoid an unwanted color cast (a tint or hue that affects the overall color balance of your video).

Some cameras support log profiles, which capture wider ranges of light and more detail in highlights and shadows.

Use LUTs

When you’ve filmed your video with the right settings, you can apply post-production techniques.

Having learned some color theory, you’ll recognise those concepts in LUTs (look-up tables), which are mathematical formulas used in video and image creation. LUTs are used for color grading and color correction. A LUT file is a kind of color grading assistant. You give it an input like the color values of a video, and it’ll use those numbers to give you the right color scheme.

LUTs work by containing predefined values which are then applied to your footage. They’ll map and correct your not-quite-bright-enough blues with the right values, and make everything consistent throughout your video.

There are free LUTS are available online, and some are designed for specific looks, such as ‘moody’ or ‘cinematic’. This is a quick way to apply your preferred style. Often these themes need minimal adjustment, which can save you editing time and let you focus more on content creation.

They’re also a way to experiment. You can browse through LUTs and consider a range of styles, some of which you might not have considered. You may then notice some of your favourite channels using particular styles and be more aware of they’re chosen.

Use editing software

You can make further precise adjustments with editing software, such as Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro and DaVinci Resolve (whose developers wanted to give props to Leonardo).

These apps are popular for good reason: they can help you easily cut and trim clips, support multi-camera shooting, and offer various visual effects and motion graphics (for things like your video titles).

They can also help bring out your video’s colors. They offer a quick way make basic adjustments to things such as exposure, contrast, and saturation, as well as apply color grading and use LUTs.

Adjusting qualities like hue and saturation can make your colors “pop”. This should be considered while you’re shooting, but it’s common to enhance colors in post-production.

If your videos have multiple scenes, these apps can ensure consistency throughout, which can otherwise be a time-consuming process.

One advantage of Premiere Pro is that it can integrate with other Adobe products, which is handy if you’re already creating on Photoshop or Effects, for example.

If you’re part of a team, both Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve offer collaboration features, meaning more than one person can work on your video colours.