LuttieThe black and white look
Removing colour is the one thing a black-and-white conversion should not do first. The good version decides how each colour becomes a shade of grey — which is exactly what coloured filters did on black-and-white film — and only then discards the colour.
Where it comes from
Black-and-white film photographers carried a bag of coloured glass filters: red to darken skies and make clouds explode, orange to smooth skin, green to lighten foliage. Each filter blocks its opposite, changing which colours become dark grey. Digital channel mixing does the same maths without the glass, which is why a good monochrome grade starts by choosing a virtual filter rather than dragging saturation to zero.
How to grade it
In order. Every control below exists in the Luttie editor, free to use in your browser.
Channel mixer
Start here, not at saturation. Decide the red/green/blue weights before anything else.
Red weighting
Raise it to darken blue skies and lighten skin — the classic red-filter effect.
Orange weighting
Favour it for portraits: skin smooths, blemishes fade, skies stay moderately dark.
Green weighting
Raise for landscapes; foliage lightens and separates from sky.
Contrast
Push further than you would in colour. Monochrome carries contrast that would look extreme in colour.
Film grain
Add a real pass. Clean digital monochrome reads as a desaturated photo, not a black-and-white one.
When it works
Portraits where colour distracts from expression or form
Scenes with strong shape and texture but weak or ugly colour
Street and documentary work
Mixed-lighting footage where colour correction is a losing battle
When to avoid it
Avoid it when colour carries the information — product, food, fashion — and on low-contrast, flat-light footage, where removing colour leaves you with nothing to look at.
Frequently asked
Because desaturating maps every colour to grey using one fixed formula, so a red apple and a green leaf of similar brightness both become the same mid-grey and the image goes flat. Channel mixing lets you decide that reds become light and greens become dark — or the reverse — which is where all the separation and drama in good monochrome comes from.
It blocks blue and green light, so anything blue — most obviously the sky — renders much darker, while reds and skin tones render lighter. The result is dramatic near-black skies with white clouds, and smoother-looking skin. It is the single most recognisable black-and-white photographic effect.
Yes. A .cube LUT maps input colours to output colours, and mapping every colour to a grey value is a perfectly ordinary transform. That means you can build a channel-mixed monochrome conversion once and apply it identically across a whole shoot or timeline.
More than colour work, usually. Black-and-white film stocks were often faster and grainier, and the eye accepts far more texture without colour noise alongside it. Grain also breaks up banding in large smooth areas like skies, which monochrome exposes more readily.
Build it on your own footage
Drop in a photo or pull a frame from a video, grade it in the browser, and export a .cube LUT for DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro or CapCut.
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