Color Grading LUT
Color Grading LUTs can be used to achieve very pleasing colors and correct several issues with Sony's factory technical transfer LUTs.
These LUTs are not creative LUTs. Color and contrast are naturally clean. These LUTs are designed to quickly complete 90% of images while improving color.
Sony's stock S-Log3 LUT has a few issues that I always need to fix:
• Yellows and warm tones are too close to green.
• Blues are too magenta.
• Skin looks sickly (especially on the A7s III/FX3).
To avoid wasting time correcting each shot, I created these LUTs to speed up my post workflow and added three additional features, which are detailed below.
All LUTs in this pack have the same basic corrections. These corrections consist of rotating each color slightly to correct for unsightly colors. Mainly yellows and reds.
The biggest difference can be seen in the skin tones and other natural elements in the photo, such as grass, trees, and warm tones.
False Color LUT
False color LUTs show only three colors:
• Red = Highlight Clipping
• Dark Green = Correct Skin Tone Exposure
• Light Green = 1 Stop Skin Tone Exposure
This means you can check for highlight clipping and ensure skin tones are correctly exposed at a glance.
The colors shown in this LUT have been specifically tuned for S-Log3 and can even be used on Sony cameras that support .cube LUTs.
Exposure Shift
Each color grading LUT has two numbers that represent the exposure offset. This allows you to overexpose footage (to improve noise performance) and easily color grade. There are 5 exposure LUT levels to choose from:
• 0-0 – No exposure offset
• 0-5 – Overexposes footage by 0.5 stops (or half stops)
• 1-0 – Overexposes footage by 1 stop
• 1-5 – Overexposes footage by 1.5 stops
• 2-0 – Overexposes footage by 2 stops
These exposure shift features allow you to easily compensate for overexposure without spending hours manually correcting your footage. Simply find the LUT that best matches the exposure of your footage, and the LUT will apply the shift and convert to Rec.709 format in one click.
Skin tone shift
Each LUT offers five skin tone shift options:
• Base – No skin tone shift
• Skin1 – Minimal skin tone shift
• Skin2 – Minimal skin tone shift
• Skin3 – Moderate skin tone shift
• Skin4 – Strong skin tone shift
These skin tone shifts will shift the red in the skin tones towards orange. On a vectorscope, the red will rotate towards the skin tone line, which can be seen by looking at the red rotation on a vectorscope.
Color Enhancement LUT
New to the LUT Pack V3 is the Color Enhancement LUT. This LUT is designed to be used after the Master Color Correction LUT to enhance colors while leaving neutrals like gray, black, and white unaffected. This method of introducing more color is more pleasing than simply raising the saturation bar.
Simply apply this LUT after your main color grading LUT, set the opacity to zero, then gradually increase the opacity until the colors are saturated and pleasing to the eye.
