Investigation 2/7: LUTs

As someone who has been interested in learning more about color grading, I decided to look more into LUTs. Throughout my time as a film student, I’ve commonly heard the term used whenever I would watch YouTube videos about filmmaking. Despite hearing the term, I wasn’t entirely sure what exactly a LUT was.

What Are LUTs?

LUTs, also known as Look-Up Tables, are files used within color grading that are designed to quickly manipulate colors within footage. LUTs were originally meant as a way to synchronize visuals between different cameras. Due to different brands of cameras recording colors differently from one another, footage of the same scene from different cameras might look inconsistent. The solution to this would be to use a selected LUT on your footage to hopefully get more similar colors between the two cameras. While LUTs can still be used this way today, one use that has become more popular over the past years has been the use of LUTs as a quick way to color grade. By color grading footage and saving a LUT, you are then able to instantly use that LUT on any piece of footage and have the same color grading settings that you saved. While you can create your own LUT based upon your color grading settings, LUTs are also commonly given away or sold online as a way to quickly achieve a specified visual look.

Using LUTs

While various different programs like Photoshop and DaVinci resolve can make use of LUTs, the program that I will be showcasing today is Adobe Premiere Pro. If you have color graded within Premiere before you have probably come across the Creative panel under Lumetri Color. Within the Creative panel, you are able to choose a "Look" for your selective clip. These "Looks" are how you use a LUT within Premiere. Premiere already has a small collection of LUTs to choose from with the Looks selector, however, this is also how you can add in your own LUTs. By simply hitting the "Browse" function and opening the LUT from where you have it saved on your computer, you instantly have color graded footage. It is important to note that in order to get the best results out of your LUT, your footage should already be color corrected to be as neutral as possible. This means that using a LUT isn't the one click solution to color grading that you might have thought it was. The LUT that I have most commonly used so far is a free utility LUT from Kondor Blue. A utility LUT like this one is designed to make flat footage from some cameras look normal without having to color grade it every time. If I were to use a LUT that aims to completely change the look of the footage, I would use a stylistic LUTs which, like the name says, stylizes the footage with the desired effects.

Work Log

• 2/1 - Planned out course of action to finish film
• 2/2 - Rewrote narration for the final time :)
• 2/3 - Prepped shooting space for reshoots
• 2/4 - First day of reshoots, recorded narration
• 2/5 - Sick, no editing or reshoots
• 2/6 - Second day of reshoots, edited 
• 2/7 - Finished editing film