LuttieThe high contrast look
Deep blacks, bright highlights and a steep midtone slope. Done carelessly it clips everything and looks cheap; done properly it is the most reliable way to make footage feel expensive on a small screen.
Where it comes from
Contrast is the oldest tool in the grading kit — printer lights and paper grades did it chemically long before curves existed. The modern taste for it comes partly from delivery: phone screens in bright rooms lose shadow detail anyway, and streaming compression flattens midtones, so a steeper curve survives the trip to the viewer better than a gentle one.
How to grade it
In order. Every control below exists in the Luttie editor, free to use in your browser.
RGB curves — Master
Place an S-curve: pull down below the midpoint, lift above it. Keep both ends inside the range at first.
Black point
Bring the bottom point right until blacks just reach zero, then back off slightly. Clipped blacks lose detail permanently.
White point
Same at the top. Watch the waveform, not the image — clipping is hard to see and impossible to undo.
Saturation
Reduce by 5–10%. Contrast raises perceived saturation, so a straight S-curve leaves colour looking overcooked.
HSL — Orange
Check skin after the curve. Contrast pushes faces toward red; pull the hue back a degree if needed.
Vignette
A light one supports the contrast by darkening the frame edges — optional, and easy to overdo.
When it works
Flat log or RAW footage that needs a base grade
Anything delivered to phones or social platforms
Footage shot in soft, diffused light that lacks shape
Action and sport, where punch beats subtlety
When to avoid it
Skip it where shadow or highlight detail carries information — product, architecture, documentary — and on footage that is already contrasty, where you will simply clip both ends.
Frequently asked
It's a curve adjustment shaped like a letter S: the shadows get pulled down, the highlights get lifted, and the midtones become steeper as a result. Because the slope through the midtones is what the eye reads as contrast, an S-curve adds punch while leaving the extreme ends roughly where they were — which is why it clips less than simply raising a contrast slider.
Because contrast operates on each colour channel, stretching the distance between them. Two pixels that differed slightly in red before now differ more, which your eye reads as more saturated colour. That's why a contrast move should almost always be followed by a small saturation reduction — otherwise skin goes ruddy and colours look synthetic.
Watch the waveform rather than the picture. Once the trace flattens against the top or bottom of the scope, you are clipping — losing detail that cannot be recovered. A good working rule is to push until you can see clipping starting, then back off until it just disappears.
Generally after a technical conversion LUT and before a creative one, so the creative look is built on properly contrasted footage. If you are exporting your own LUT from the grade, the order inside your node chain becomes part of what the LUT bakes in — which is why building it in one place and exporting once is more reliable than stacking LUTs in your editor.
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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