Colorist training courses in London?

[BSH]

Hi,

I've spent most of my worklife in postproduction for print/digital and photography: retouching and colour-grading for stills. Currently in my mid-40s, I'm looking at something new (yet related), and would like to become a colorist. I'm aware of various online courses for DaVinci,  but since I live in London a more hands-on approach via some week-end courses is also an option for me.

Can anyone (from personal experience)  recommend a good training facility? Obviously, a teacher's knowlede/teaching-style can make or break a course – so I thought I'd reach out here to see if anyone can point me in the right direction. The courses from sohoeditors.com look quite interesting. Has anyone been with them?

Many thanks!

[Bruno Mansi]

My advice would be start with the online courses first, until you get a decent amount of time under your belt, then maybe consider attending a short course.

The reason I say this is that attending courses can be fairly expensive, and you'll be better off doing the basic stuff with an online course. When the time is right, then by all means attend an intermediate/advanced course, where you can ask more informed questions and benefit from watching an experienced colourist at work.

I would steer clear of YouTube tutorials, as there's some really bad stuff out there from people who claim to be professionals, but give poor advice. 

Mixing light, Ripple Training and FXPHD are examples of online video courses which do a good job of teaching the art and craft of colour grading.

[BSH]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. This confirms what I suspected/assumed. 

Re:youtube, it's the same in my current domain (retouching) – lots of tutorials out there, but hard to gauge a tutorial's quality unless you already have some experience.

In the past, I've always had a methodical approach to learning things. I've started reading up terminology (which is similar yet different to the world of stills retouching – colour spaces, codecs, file formats). After that, I guess it's about understanding/being able to interpret scopes/waveforms (as opposed to just histograms/curves in the stills world),... and of course learning the software/shortcuts, and being able to efficiently use a panel.
Having had a play with DaVinci, I'm already fairly excited about what's possible... I've done some basic colour corrections for some stills images with Davinci, which would be a lot more complicated in Photoshop.

I'll definitely take a close look at the training websites you recommended, and also the membership/courses here on Lowepost.

Thanks again for your input!