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Color management is about carrying out an image pipeline with technical transformations to bring the color space of a camera into the color space of a display.
This blog post is a collection of links paired with my own experiences and tips that will hopefully help you to evolve your color grading skills.
In this blog post, I will also show you how to first transcode files into an edit-friendly codec. From and edit-unfriendly codec into an edit-friendly codec.

ABOUT LUTS

Code can free us from the limitations of tools within a grading software and create strokes that otherwise would not be possible.
It can be difficult to objectively judge the quality of a LUT being provided when applied to real-life footage. For me personally, I think the easiest way to analyze a LUT is using a Test Chart.
Free Sample Footage
Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K
Blackmagic RAW: 5:1

A STUDY ON

Here is a „Supercut-video” about film grain, so we can analyze film grain first before trying to replicate it.
Halation is a characteristic of celluloid film when a bright light bounces back a few times exposing the film a second time only affecting the red layer (and a bit of the green layer) of the film resulting in a orange glow.
Here are some stills from movies and TV shows with lens characteristics like chromatic aberration, lens distortion and Petzval field curvature.
A study of color in film.

LOOKS

In this blog post, I show you how to apply a „Kodak 2383 D55“ LUT to your footage. Furthermore, I share my thoughts about other elements of film like Halation, Gate Weave, Grain, Flicker, Film Damage and more.
“The Lighthouse” was shot on Kodak’s Eastman Double-X black-and-white 5222 film stock with a Panavision Millennium XL2 and 1930s-’40s Baltar lenses. Cinematographer Jarin Blaschke also used custom filters that emulated early-1900s orthochromatic stock, which was sensitive to ultraviolet, blue and green light, but not red. So skin tones appear way darker.
With this website, I want to reveal the discrepancy between different approaches and hopefully enrich the ongoing discussion about it with my own approach.

EXAMPLES