I'm doing a little lecture tomorrow at filmArche on colour grading and thought that I could share a few links on the topic here.
To give a feeling for the use of colour in movies, I really like the moviebarcodes. The artists who does them wants to stay anonymous, so I can only link to his tumbl site. The image below is that site where you can also order prints (I personally find them beautiful). Wired uk described the process of making these images very well as: [the software the artist wrote takes] every single frame of the film (and its constituent colours), stretches them vertically and lines them up in chronological order to create an image that gives a visual overview of how the film would look if you saw it all in one go.
A Scanner Darkly as a Moviebarcode
Also very useful is prolost, the blog of Stu Maschwitz. He is a filmmaker with a vfx background and helped develop a number colour grading plugins that can be used with several NLEs. Stu has a collection of colour grading tutorials for one of these plugins, Colorista II, on his site. I will show Magic Bullet Looks at my little lecture as it incorporates most of the important tools for a more complex grade and is compatible with NLEs but also usable as a standalone tool to grade stills.
Grading stills in preproduction and finding reference stills from movies or other sources is a very important preproduction step in my opinion. I really like screenshotworld for browsing stills from a number of different movies.
As you may know, digital colour grading is a rather recent practice that took off only in the early 2000s with O Brother Where Are Though being credited as the first feature film to be fully digitally graded. Digital colour grading offered a whole array of more sophisticated and more targeted manipulation of colour, which is sometimes used to a very positive effect. However, as this blog post on the Teal and Orange plague nicely illustrates, it has also led to an overuse of this very powerful colour contrast.
Human colour perception is very sophisticated (although some animals have even weirder colour perception) and colour grading therefore a very important and complicated subject. I'll write more on it some time soon, but for now I hope the links here are a nice read.