Color grading
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Color grading is the process of altering and enhancing the color of a motion picture or television image, either electronically, photo-chemically or digitally. The photo-chemical process is also referred to as color-timing and is typically performed at a photographic laboratory using optical filters.
Using digital grading objects and color ranges within the scene can be isolated with perfect precision and relit or adjusted. Color tints can be manipulated and visual treatments pushed to extremes not physically possible with laboratory processing. Special digital filters and effects can be also applied to the images.
In Hollywood, O Brother, Where Art Thou was the first film to be wholly digitally graded. The negative was scanned in with a Spirit Datacine at 2K resolution and then colors were digitally fine-tuned using Lustre. The process took several weeks. The resulting digital master was output on film again with a Kodak laser recorder to create a print master.