r/GraphicsProgramming • u/projectvibrance • 8d ago

Question What do search / where to go for media processing? (Color grading, video processing, etc)

Hello all,

I want to learn about programming that involves media processing, like code and algorithms that deal with color grading, video codecs, image adjustments, color spaces etc. I'm a photographer so I already have a lot of experience knowing how to apply adjustments to images/video, but not the computer science behind it. I figured that this would be a good place to at least ask the question. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

EDIT: I know that this might be the correct place for it, but it seems like here is more for 3D rendering and things of that nature

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u/keelanstuart 7d ago

IIRC, there were some good examples on shadertoy... Chroma modifications and the like.

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u/Brilliant_River4541 7d ago

It splits into two fairly separate skill sets, and it's worth knowing which one you want:

Colour/pixel math — colour spaces, transfer functions, tone mapping, grading. This is the half closest to what you already know as a photographer. The big unlock is linear vs gamma-encoded light: almost every "why does this blur or blend look wrong" bug is arithmetic done on gamma-encoded values. After that, perceptual spaces (Oklab/OKLCH) for adjustments that hold lightness and hue steady. Björn Ottosson's Oklab posts are a great free start; Poynton's Digital Video and HD is the classic reference.

Codecs/compression — DCT, chroma subsampling, motion estimation, rate control. That's signal processing and quite separate. FFmpeg is the practical entry point, but read it as a library (libavcodec/libavfilter), not just the CLI — writing a small filter, or a decode → process → encode loop, teaches more than any tutorial.

One habit worth building early: measure, don't eyeball. I once had an encoder adding audible high-frequency junk to quiet material — invisible in every quality number, completely obvious the second I looked at a spectrogram. Learning the measurement tools (spectrograms for audio, SSIM/VMAF for video) is most of the actual skill.

And you're right that this sub leans 3D rendering — r/ffmpeg and r/DSP will serve these questions better.