The WORST Colour Grading Mistake on YouTube

0:00 Intro
0:21 Gamma & Gamut
3:34 Why Saturation & S-Curve aren't enough
6:17 Understanding Gamut Compression
10:52 Increasing saturation can destroy footage
13:09 LUTs aren't evil

[musanetesakupwanya]

You know what... This makes me think of music cos a lot of people can talk about it on a surface level, but have no idea what's happening on a technical level. This just explained things so well I realized I'm that person who talks without fully understanding.. But you just gave me a quick class to make me understand this a whole lot better! Thank you!!!

[goninoluke]

This channel is amazing and it just gets more epic with every new drop! Thanks for sharing all this information with us.

[paulidevoss]

Your videos are brilliant Eric. It’s a rare person who can understand and communicate complex ideas so clearly. Also a nice antidote to the tech bros repeating misinformation everywhere. Bravo

[illa]

THIS is the video I've been looking for, explaining the tiny bits details, the concept that becomes the reasoning to do things, etc; not only telling us to do things. But the "why we do things."
I feel like I found a gem o-o Thank you so much for sharing this with us out here...

[promisedirisu]

Funny how I skip other creators color grading videos to wait patiently for a notification on your next tutorial.
As a newbie to color grading, I feel it's unwise to crowd my head with different knowledge or techniques from various creators, will never tell which may be misleading
I love your videos, you're a good teacher and I enjoy every minute of your explanation, can't wait to grow from a newbie colourist to a pro with your constant tutorials And teachings

Thanks again
Much love from Nigeria 🇳🇬

[AnandaGarden]

Tremendously helpful. Thank you for understanding this issue in depth and translating it so clearly for us - and thus helping us avoid the frustration of unfortunate color shifts. This is a high-value channel for video makers looking for pleasing colors.

[CarterFennen]

This channel helps solidify and explain the why in the how of color grading, great work my man, please never stop!

[PCNormann]

Hi Eric,
Thank you for the fantastic guides! They have truly given me a better understanding than I've ever received from others regarding lighting and color grading.From today, you are my preferred YouTuber in your field! 😉

[torquefilms]

I have been a camera operator for 20 years and this was the best explanation of this concept that I have ever seen. Doug Jensen hit on this a little when he explained why you needed to do a camera white balance every time. He said that eyeballing the kelvin does not properly map your white point and you will end up with a green or magenta image in post.

[ncarrick]

I have never seen content this good on YouTube. Ever. I have never experienced educational content of ANY kind this good. Ever. Thank you. Please keep up the amazing work.

[cispulmonary]

Awesome video, very comprehensive. I love your use of sketches for exemplification!

[MaximoJoshua]

Great video! This is exactly how I approach it, because in my mind, color spaces are encodings, which should just be encoded accurately. Color management can deal with this easily. It is much nicer to just start with a correctly decoded and encoded image, and then just apply your creative choices, rather than trying to guess or approximate the math...

The other issue is that most color management (CST or LUT) do these fundamental operations AND they do some additional steps which are completely preference based Tone and Gamut mapping.

The transfer function is not tone mapping, the idea is that the scene referred data can be converted back to linear, and from linear it can be encoded for any display...tone mapping is choosing how to handle values that don't fit inside the target space.

In Resolve, you can see this, because you can turn off the tone mapping, while still converting between log and display. Tone and Gamut mapping are how we deal with values that don't fit in our target color space.

[Doctopie]

Very well explained. Never understood why adding saturation to Log images would skew the colours until you explained it!

[GothGomez]

Thank you so much for this video - it's one thing to just show people how to do something (I lecture editing students in a community college) but to actually teach people WHY we do things the way we do them is so much more important, because everyone can hone their own creativity but knowledge and digesting all of the information necessary changes people forever in the best way. Kudos, sir.

[UrbanPlumbers]

The best channel about video production on YouTube - well done!

[heymiranda]

This channel is a hidden GEM. Thanks for sharing!

[whakydude]

Love these videos Eric! It's very hard to find channels that explain the fundamentals so clearly. I've definitely experienced the pitfalls you mention here, and will certainly be taking this info into my next grade. That said, I feel some examples of how the difference between doing this the right way vs the wrong way looks would have been even more helpful. I can always try it myself though, so still a great video!

[elbas]

Thank you. There are way too many "tutorials" eyeballing the final result. Math behind log conversion is always correct.

[ahmetjan]

this is fantastic, I've never thought that there would be a hue shift between using proper lut and s-curve adjustment

[jayzee]

so glad you are tackling these fundamental concepts