That's right, the first tip I have for you is that you SHOULD color correct.  I've fallen into this trap many times, the footage looks good on my monitor, and so I render and deliver.  Then I look at it later and wonder why it looks just a little bit flat.

Any time you think your footage looks "good enough,"  at least TRY out a gentle contrast curve and see if you like it.  Chances are, it'll make your footage look better. 

There are TONS of Color Correction apps and plugins available  which one should you pick?  Well it all depends on what you're trying to do.

For most projects, a plugin will do just fine.  For most of our smaller projects we use Magic Bullet Looks or Colorista to do a quick and easy grade right inside Adobe Premiere CS6.  We really like Looks because there are tons of presets that you can select and tweak to your liking - A great thing when you're on a major time crunch.

For our larger projects, such as our reality shows, which can have several hundred shots from different cams, different exposures, and different white balances, we will use Davinci Resolve 9.  Resolve is very powerful and fast.  You can do some really advanced masking and tracking very quickly.  The trade-off is that you have to round-trip your files out of your editor and conform them inside of Resolve.  An extra step, but it's worth it if you have a lot of work to do.

If you poke around on the internet, you'll start to figure out one thing: Hardware is important.

There are all types of desks, control surfaces, keyboards, chairs, and other equipment to spend money on, but the REALLY important thing is your monitor.  After all, color correction is all about making your image "LOOK GOOD" right?  So you need a monitor that will show you how the image ACTUALLY looks.  Pro monitors can be calibrated so that whites look white, blacks look black, and all the colors in between are represented in their true glory.

We use the Eizo ColorEdge, which has quickly become one of our most cherished pieces of equipment.  It even has a built in colorimeter that will make sure it looks good all the time.

If you don't have cash for a good monitor, you can probably guess at your colors, view them on several devices and tweak accordingly, but when you're on a deadline, you just don't have time for that.  A good monitor will show you how your image REALLY looks and that's super important.

You ever get halfway done painting something and realize you're out of paint?  It sucks.

Just like you want to make sure you have plenty of materials for a painting project, you want to make sure you have a color workflow that actually works for you.  There's nothing worse then being faced with a deadline and you're panicking trying to figure out why your project won't open.

Trust me on this one, before you even start a project, shoot a test with the same type of camera, and take a simple clip ALL THE WAY through your workflow.  From shoot to edit to color to final render.  You might just discover an even better way to finish your project just by having the play time.

Real simply, your eyes adjust to color.  99.9 Percent of the time that's ok.  When you're doing color correction, it's bad.   If you stare at an image long enough a cyan can appear white, greys can appear black, and you can all out convince yourself that a shot looks great even when it doesn't.  

Take breaks at least every hour or so, get some coffee, come back to your shots and look at them again.  You'll be surprised at how often you'll ask yourself "What was I thinking?"

Got an extra monitor laying around, plug it in, watch your video on that.  Your TV, your laptop, ipad, iphone, your Mom's TV, anything that you can watch a video on, watch your work on that.  Until you get used to how your grades look on different devices, it's a good idea to double check.

This is especially important if you don't have a calibrated monitor, you can learn how your monitor looks compared to most devices and grade with that in mind. But even if you have a pro-status monitor like our Eizo, you might want to try it on other devices just to see how it looks.