We have been using color look up tables (LUTs) for over 18 months now. Using LUTs is an easy and fast way to grade footage. You can read more about color grading plug-ins and look up tables HERE.
While there were only a handful LUTs available on the web 1 ½ years ago the number of companies offering grading presets has hugely increased.
A while ago I stumbled across the Cinema Colour presets by Rocket Rooster which got an update shortly. Just like the name suggests the LUTs are designed to give digital footage a filmic look.
Below is a short demo video featuring some of the presets:
Description from the Rocket Rooster website: “The pack is based off Super 35 and Super 16 Film stock and features a set of film emulation LUTs that you can use to get the look of popular film stock in just a few clicks. The pack features over 30 different film negative and positive print emulation LUTs with LOG and Rec709 versions to choose from. As an added bonus you get an extra 20 creative grades/looks based off the pack to quickly get you something different. The pack also features of variations of the emulation LUTs to choose from giving you a wide variety to suit different needs.”
To give you a better idea of how different the looks are we applied different Cinema Colour II LUTs to the same clip:
LUT sample: Rocket Rooster Cinema Colour II from Fenchel & Janisch on Vimeo.
Pretty useful is also the “camera to Rec.709 ” LUT. A lot of different cameras like the Panasonic GH4, Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera as well as Canon and Nikon DSLRs have their own profile. All-in-all the presets offer a good variety of different looks. In general it works best to apply the LUT to an adjustment layer and then adjust the opacity depending on how strong the look should be. For more precise correction it makes sense to combine the LUT with levels for some fine tuning or other color correction plug-ins.
As you can see below the set comes in three different versions, starting from $15 to $45 for the pro pack.
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Written by Moritz Janisch