Hello everyone! I need some help doing proper color correction.
I'm completely new to video shooting/editing and Kdenlive.
Basically, I have a lighting kit but I'm also relying on natural light for the shot. In the editor, it's clear to see the hue and brightness shifting from one clip to the next, since the shoot took about an hour the sun and clouds shifted quite a bit. This whole project is low-budget DIY, so I cannot get more lights or shoot anywhere else.

How can I most efficiently color correct the entire project so that each clip has a consistent hue and brightness? What I've been doing so far is using some color effects (both kdenlive and frei0r) on one clip until I get a good result, then pasting the effects onto the next clip and tweaking as needed. But it's getting a bit tedious and some clips will just not work with me. The white background is difficult to manipulate without making the actor seem like he's too bright. Some clips are too yellow, some too grey, etc. If any of you have more experience with this, I would appreciate tips.

As an example, here are two shots- before any color correction.

I'm afraid that there ain't any better method than tweaking each scene individually. The two shots don't look too bad, but it's difficult to judge them properly here. If you use natural light and cannot rely completely on artificial light then you simply need to live with changing light. Next, there's that white balance thing ... in automatic mode it will surely cause some issues of its own. So either set a fixed color temperature to which you stick throughput all shots or recalibrate manually before each scene. But you will still see color shifts, a fixed color temperature is no ticket to unconditional success.

Some thing that slightly puzzles me: to you, is it more important to have perfect images or a good story? As a viewer I personally value content more over perfect color grading, unless the grading really sucks. I don't think that your raw footage is that bad, at least judging from your two shots.

TheDiveO wrote:Next, there's that white balance thing ... in automatic mode it will surely cause some issues of its own. So either set a fixed color temperature to which you stick throughput all shots or recalibrate manually before each scene. But you will still see color shifts, a fixed color temperature is no ticket to unconditional success.

Some thing that slightly puzzles me: to you, is it more important to have perfect images or a good story? As a viewer I personally value content more over perfect color grading, unless the grading really sucks. I don't think that your raw footage is that bad, at least judging from your two shots.

I kept the white balance on the camera the same throughout, I reall think it would help next time if I calibrate it for every shot. I suppose I didn't really expect it to shift so much, didn't plan for that during the shoot. I will have to practice with that a bit, since it was difficult for me to tell that the color had shifted until I got the footage into the editor.
I prefer great content over quality as well, but since shooting and editing are my jobs for this project, i just thought to get some input on this issue because I want to do a good job. I wanted to get all the clips flowing smoothly. But there are other things I can do if the color grading is too noticeable, such as adding a slideshow of images while the actor is talking during certain clips.
Thank you for the help, though! I appreciate it.

I think I also learnt something here: avoid a white background ... one may notice all kind of imperfections and thus distract. My experience with white balance is that every camera behaves slightly different, some even rather clearly different.