3 Rules Every Colorist Should Know

[Waqas Qazi]

NEW VIDEO -

YouTube (Short URL)

There are endless trainings and tutorials on how to correct or grade your footage but no one really shares the thought process, the reason behind every decision, and the why. I believe color grading is as important if not more than editing and cinematography and it requires the same amount of prep.

In this video, I am going to share with you what helped me become a professional colorist and how you can apply the same rules to your workflow to get better at your craft or land your next gig.

Also, I am giving a FREE "LUT Pack" for those who are interested. It includes my Teal and Orange, Bleach Bypass, and Film-like Black and White LUT. Link is in the video description.

Enjoy the episode. Bless up!

[Gary Huff]

Rule #1 should be “don’t use LUTs”.

[Doug Jensen]

Okay, I'll bite. Why shouldn't LUTs be used? Please elaborate.

[Josh Bass]

He probably means in a “plop it on and dont tweak it, done” kinda way. Personally what struck me the most is how conservative the ratio in the original footage appears to be compared to the end result. Was that planned?

[Ryan Elder]

What do you mean by conservative, in this context?

[Josh Bass]

The dark parts arent that dark in the original image...fairly low contrast (again, in my opinion) compared to the end result.

[Doug Jensen]

I haven't even watched the video, I'm just asking Gary to elaborate on why he says " Rule #1 should be “don’t use LUTs”. What is his reason behind such a bold statement? I'd really love to hear more about why LUTs should be avoided and what alternative he recommends instead.

[Josh Bass]

In addition to what I said above I would also guess he means it would be better to start from scratch and learn how to cc/grade yourself to get the desired results rather than slapping a preset/preset node chain on there.

[Doug Jensen]

I'd rather hear what he means from him.
The purpose of LUTs goes far beyond just slapping a Magic Bullets look on the footage.

[Gary Huff]

LUTs do serve a purpose. I generate a LUT from a quick dashed together look that I am aiming for and load it into my SmallHD 702 Bright for clients to see. Sometimes that same LUT will go to an editor if they need something to throw on the footage so that the client isn't getting drafts rendered out in Log. LUTs are very useful in ensuring clients don't see native log footage, because they nearly always say something if they do. I did use a LUT recently in a final edit because I was going with the camera-native Rec.709 look and had two shots in Log that I used the supplied LUT to transform from cinema gamut/log to Rec.709/WideDR, and then tweak that to match the rest for a quick turnaround.

The most common issue I have with LUTs is that they obliterate highlight detail, which you're already using just going from a 15-stop Log to a 9-stop Rec.709 output, but the overall reason is that they deal in absolutes. I pick a shot, I grade it for that camera with that particular exposure for that particular shot and then generate my LUT. Now I have a LUT that, to the eye, looks practically identical, but it works for that particular use. Not a bad thing when you're just monitoring it, but when you're grading the final the absolute nature of how LUTs transform color. And, in my experience, LUTs do not hold up when needing to adjust for these different clips as opposed to adjusting directly.

Now, you said that the purpose goes for beyond just slapping a "Magic Bullets look" onto the footage. But they don't. Their purpose should be limited to looks on set and for a limited use in post to help with early proof exports. Magic Bullet Looks is a plugin I have played with, but it has never been the final color solution (best thing Red Giant did with that was pull Colorista out of it and made it standalone, although Lumetri has finally added the hue transforms that made me still use Colorista). Red Giant Film is much better, but I feel that has some of the same issues that using, say, the ImpulZ LUTs do, and really seems to be calibrated towards people who ETTR (which I think is a huge mistake), so I have to constantly bring up the Exposure setting on well-exposed Log footage.

Here is a personal project I used Red Giant Film on.

YouTube (Short URL)

For most uses, I use a plugin chain in Premiere that starts with Lumetri and ends with FilmConvert, which uses profiles for cameras and doesn't obliterate my highlight detail like ImpulZ. I only have FilmConvert doing the final color transform (I will occasionally short-cut and use the color controls, but mostly I adjust saturation/contrast/color wheels in Lumetri), and I absolutely turn off the simulated grain. It looks great if you're going out to Blu-ray, but for a typical YouTube/Vimeo/Wistia export, the grain quickly turns into a macroblocked mess.

[Doug Jensen]

I don't think you understand how LUTs are used with S-LOG and RAW. You cannot convert S-GAMUT color spaces by hand without an appropriate LUT. And using the correct LUT is also a huge time saver for gamma adjustments as it get things into the right ballpark non-destructively. In fact, LUTs are almost mandatory as a starting point for transforming Sony RAW, S-LOG3, and to some extent S-LOG2, into REC709 video. They are not a substitute for grading -- they are the first step of grading and a huge time saver. So it doesn't make sense to say the number one rule is not to use them. As I said, LUTs are much more important than just being a poor man's Magic Bullet looks, which is what many people think are the only thing LUTs are good for.

[Cary Knoop]

Originally Posted by Doug Jensen

I don't think you understand how LUTs are used with S-LOG and RAW. You cannot convert S-GAMUT color spaces by hand without an appropriate LUT. And using the correct LUT is also a huge time saver for gamma adjustments as it get things into the right ballpark non-destructively. In fact, LUTs are almost mandatory as a starting point for transforming Sony RAW, S-LOG3, and to some extent S-LOG2, into REC709 video. They are not a substitute for grading -- they are the first step of grading and a huge time saver. So it doesn't make sense to say the number one rule is not to use them. As I said, LUTs are much more important than just being a poor man's Magic Bullet looks, which is what many people think are the only thing LUTs are good for.

Not true, professional color grading software has color space transforms, which are more correct than LUTs.

[Gary Huff]

Originally Posted by Doug Jensen

In fact, LUTs are almost mandatory as a starting point for transforming Sony RAW, S-LOG3, and to some extent S-LOG2, into REC709 video.

Almost mandatory isn't the same thing as being mandatory, your wiggle room exposes the problem, primarily being that you're just flat out wrong. You can most definitely Rec.709 Log footage without any sort of LUT at all. You also conflate Sony Raw with Log, which is needless. Raw doesn't need to be in Log, Sony's implementation of it is.

LUTs are much more important than just being a poor man's Magic Bullet looks, which is what many people think are the only thing LUTs are good for.

You can do far more to craft a great image with Magic Bullet Looks than you can do with a LUT. I take it you have never done so, or perhaps you can show an example of the last project you did that is not stock footage or a training video you sell?

[Doug Jensen]

Originally Posted by Cary Knoop

Not true, professional color grading software has color space transforms, which are more correct than LUTs.

You're right, that is a valid alternative but in my experience transforms take a lot more processing power and really slow down my playback speeds and rendering to a crawl. I don't know if others share that experience but that's mine. On the other hand, when using LUTs I can manage to playback heavily graded 4K footage at full speed with no dropped frames on the timeline, and 30 fps footage will render at about 55 fps. Anyway, there's no way the #1 rule of grading is not to use LUTs even if there are alternatives, which was the point I was trying to make.

[Gary Huff]

Originally Posted by Doug Jensen

Yin my experience transforms take a lot more processing power and really slow down my playback speeds and rendering to a crawl.

Except that's not your experience. All Log is is a way to maintain a gamma curve that is more like what Raw could contain in a format that's YUV, so there's no transform. When you add the contrast back, that's when you start losing information, and then when you adjust exposure beyond that. Also similar to how cinema gamut works. You're not doing "transforms" in the traditional sense, and most of that is handled transparently by your NLE upon import. So basically, in your use case, as soon as you import a file into Premiere it is doing a transform into 32-bit float without you touching anything. So it's not slowing down your playback speeds, that's just nonsense.

On the other hand, when using LUTs I can manage to playback heavily graded 4K footage

Heavily graded? Lots of contrast and saturation? What do you mean specifically by "heavily"? Hue transforms? Secondaries? Power windows? Adjusting the White Balance point, adding loads of contrast, and making it 150 points of saturation is not "heavy" grading. I have a 2017 iMac and I don't have any issues with Lumetri as far as speed goes, I guess if you're still on a 2012 with 4K I can see where LUTs would be ideal. Frankly, their use sounds like a shortcut for you, which is fine, but I would bet what you're doing is filming everything in Slog2 or Slog3, then slapping on the Rec.709 LUT and then saturating and adding contrast and adjusting exposure and such. Which, for someone who processes thousands of clips, is literally a waste of time. Unless you plan to offer stock in Log gamma, you could literally film in a Rec.709 preset on the camera that gives you the same look you're already getting with the LUT.

Now, I will say that for your clientele, just throwing on a LUT and fooling around with the basic color correction in Lumetri isn't a big deal. But this video isn't about people like you, it's about colorists. I don't care if you use a LUT, but if you want to be a colorist and work for me, you better not be using LUTs as a crutch.