LuttieLearn color grading
Most grading advice arrives as scattered tips. This is the same material in the order you actually need it, starting from what a LUT is and ending with your own exported .cube file. 25 lessons, all free to read.
Nothing to sign up for. Read in any order you like, though the stages build on each other.
Foundations
You understand what a LUT is, what white balance does, and why RAW gives you room the JPEG never had.
In the editor
- Temperature
- Warms toward amber or cools toward blue, correcting the colour of the light you shot under.
- Tint
- The other axis: green one way, magenta the other. This is the one that fixes fluorescent cast.
- Advanced mode
- Switches the grading chain into the node graph, so you can see the stages the post describes.
The core moves
You can take a flat or badly lit image and make it correct, before you make it interesting.
In the editor
- Brightness
- Moves the whole image up or down together. Use it to find the general level first.
- Blacks / Whites
- Move only the ends. This is what you want when the image looks flat, not brightness.
- Contrast
- Shapes what happens between the two ends, once both are set.
- Vibrance
- Saturates the muted colours harder than the already-saturated ones, which is gentler on skin.
Look development
You can build a deliberate look rather than nudging sliders until something feels right.
In the editor
- Shadows / Midtones / Highlights
- Three colour wheels, each with hue, saturation and lightness. Most film looks are built here.
- Faded film
- Lifts the black point the way an old print does, for that washed, low-contrast base.
- Halation
- The warm bleed from bright highlights. The Hue control sets its colour, around 10 for most stocks.
- Grain
- Amount and size, applied last. It sits on top of a finished image rather than inside the grade.
Your camera
You can take your own log footage from flat to graded, using the transfer curve your camera actually shot.
In the editor
- Cam WB / Auto WB
- On a RAW file, re-decodes using the camera's recorded white balance or one derived from the sensor data.
- Preset browser
- Search by camera to find a conversion look for your log profile, then grade on top of it.
Shipping it
You can export your grade as a .cube file and apply it in whatever editor you actually cut in.
In the editor
- Export LUT
- Writes the colour half of your grade to a .cube file. Pro.
- Vignette
- Worth knowing it will not survive the export. It depends on where a pixel sits, and a LUT has no idea.
Once you have the basics
The looks library breaks down how specific film grades are built, control by control. The free LUT library gives you ready-made files to pull apart, and the full blog has everything that did not fit this path.