You’ll all hate me for this - but I’ll mention here that Final Cut Pro X has some rather nice tools for colour grading and colour correction - that includes adjusting levels to ensure you don’t clip your blacks and whites. Obviously - colour correct first (that is, make sure your levels and whites are nicely balanced), then colour grade (adjust colours to taste).
The drawbacks are:
1 - You’ll need a Mac. You’ll also need to be aware that Apple decided that my 2006 MBP was no longer powerful enough to run FCPX, which is a bummer (so new Laptop is required for portable FCP larks), so software obsolescence for older machines is likely.
2 - You’ll need £200 - it’s an expensive bit of software, but nowhere near as expensive as FCP originally was (£900+). The FCPX price is around the same as you’d previously pay for Final Cut Express - which was a pretty decent bit of software for hobbyists.
If you have access to a Mac and want to try it out, there’s a download here:
http://www.apple.com/final-cut-pro/Anyway, some tutorials:
http://digitalfilms.wordpress.com/2011/ ... -in-fcp-x/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqbmT4Lx4uMThere’s loads about this, but since I discovered how to do all of this colour correction last year, I’ve found I can get a lot more out of the footage from my video camera, and even the GoPro seems to be massively improved.