How LUTs Can Elevate Your Cinematography

Let's explain the colour workflow process, what LUTs are, and how they can be used to improve the look of your footage.

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T. Bless & The Professionals - 'Ace Of Spades'
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Chill Winston - ‘The Truth’

0:00 Introduction
0:58 What Is A LUT?
4:05 3 Workflow Levels
7:04 Squarespace
8:05 Industry Colour Workflow
12:17 Conclusion

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[vidhikavidhaan]

Choosing the bear to make a video on LUTs was the right thing to do. It has one of the best colour grades I have seen in a while.

[MarmeladeHawk]

As someone who's interests lie in editing, I'm always excited when colour grading gets mentioned

[romepix]

Fascinating. There is art in color work across so many mediums.

[ginoamadori]

Hahahahah, good video, it was funny looking at this and all of a sudden my picture pops up at 3:49 saying IF THERE IS A COLORIST😅

[christykail]

Great video! A quick correction/clarification on the colour space transforms and CDLs: Most LUTs are both a creative look and a colour space transoform combined into one file. This allows it to be very easily loaded into a camera or monitor, and it will take the image from the log signal directly to Rec709 with the desired look.

A CDL is used in combination with a LUT, not instead of. It's used for making basic per-shot or per-scene adjustments without having to make an entire new LUT. The CDL is always applied before the LUT, so the signal chain wil be LOG > CDL > LUT.

With the arrival of the Alexa 35, Arri is trying to move DoPs into splitting their creative LUT and colour space transform into two differnt stages, to make it easier to deliver for different display standards, such as P3 and Rec 2100. The A35 automatically applies its own Log to Rec709 transform to monitors, so the signal chain becomes LOG > CDL > Creative LUT > Arri built-in transform.

[iborov]

Very well explained! Simple to grasp and fully understand the process of using LUTs.

No BS and just the needed!

[silaselias]

I was the audio mixer for the interviews with Andrew Wehde at Filmscape Chicago 2023!

[techtt]

Can you maybe do a video on HDR? How does Dolby Vision and such impact the cinematography? For me as a viewer it makes a huge difference. I'd choose 1080p HDR over 4K SDR.

[Two_marshmallows]

My mind blowed up when you’ve said (10:20): “after CST we can add lut”, than I remembered that thing is about explaining and not about a node-tree

[MaximoJoshua]

Hmm, the way I have always thought of it was that a LUT is a Lookup Table, so I imagine, for example

0 | 12
10 | 15
20 | 18

etc

So you take your value, and you look at the table and find the value, if it doesn't exist you find the closest one and then "guess" (interpolate) where it is in between those 2 lines in the table (in actuality, its not a 2 dimensional table, its a 3 dimensional cube, but same principal basically). This is very similar to, for example, when you are in math class and you are graphing a function...and that is exactly what it is, the LUT gives you points on the curve, which shows an approximation of the actual equation.

This is different from a Color Space Transform, at least from what I understand, because that is more like just having the equation, you never need to guess or approximate values, because you can calculate the exact value for any given input. That is why nowadays everyone says "don't use LUTs, use Color Management or CST's"

Obviously not all LUT's are created equal, and many LUT's might have a ton of values for a lot of different inputs (high resolution), but I think in general, LUT's are being relegated more and more to creative looks and not the actual color correction (Log -> Rec 709), as when it comes to accuracy, the CST or Color Management will be more accurate. Of course, you would still use LUT's on a monitor to check your exposure, and get a pretty good idea of how it will look after color correction and color grading.

I just think it should be clarified the difference between color correction (making the footage look as accurate as possible) and color grading (making stylized, artistic choices to set mood, etc), and I am curious how you reconcile the on set monitoring with the post color correction...

very great video, loved the details. Would love to see more about the daily process.

[bernardmarques]

this is my favorite yt channel, thank you

[KristophTy]

Amazing Video as always guys. I just recently got into C.G. And videos like this really help explain what I need to know. Thank You!

[LittleJimmy]

You briefly touched on on it here, but I’d love to see a whole video on the photochemical timing process, and why a small handful of filmmakers (like PT Anderson) still choose it over a DI.

Aside from one video with David Lynch, I can’t even find one video on YouTube about photochemical timing.

[Oceansta]

how do you create a LUT in advance without having ever seen the location or how the scene is going to be lit?

[Cinnovations]

I created an amazing 65 point lut from a frankensteined series of powergrades that were stitched together. A Red Komodo > ArriLogC > Kodak 5219 500T w/ 2383 FPE. The Kodak was developed side by side with 500T + Arri Alexa and has very, very close accuracy, even at all the +/- EV. I have to keep the source secret because it's proprietary and a lot of work went into its development and I was helping crowd fund its creation and it cost the color scientist quite a lot of money to make. I use it on almost everything. It's much more accurate than Dehancer, but its the only option. I use it for monitoring (using a 33 point version) because 2383 crushes blacks and the saturation is pronounced, so I can get a really good idea of what my footage will look like in post. It's crucial because the fill ratios can be dialed in perfectly. I then simply use the original powergrade in post and do any fine tuning to all parameters. Even the grain has been dialed into each RGB channel to imitate celluloids grain behavior in each layer. It's absolutely gorgeous. Best part is, it's a starting point for a look, and can be taken many different places.

[SomewhatAbnormal]

I come from photography but now I shoot video. I like the idea of creating an onset “negative” that’s close to finished. I would never hand my photography over to another person for grading, and I don’t want to do that with video either.

[mmm]

Thank you very much you are the best !!!

[maurice_morales]

Fantastic job on this video. Seriously. My only feedback is some of the terminology used. Instead of "RAW footage" use then term Camera Originals or Camera Negative because not all footage is "RAW". Also use the terms color space and/or gamma curve. Color Profile is too close to photography terms that you'll find inside a Canon DSLR. Generally this was an amazing video. :)

[vorancb]

where can you learn how to make preview luts for shootings

[alexanderjohansson]

How do you create a proper LUT? Would love to see a video of this.