I like the DJI Lut. Am I inexperienced?

[joeywestside]

Hi everyone,

I just side-graded from the Air 2 to the Mavic 2 Pro and I'm working on color grading. I tend to prefer a cinematic look for YouTube, or a more vibrant look for Instagram/FB. I've looked at several different luts and I'm really preferring the DJI Lut with some other tweaks. I'm using Lumafusion. Does that mean I'm just inexperienced at color grading and have an immature taste in color? Will other people see my stuff and think I'm a noob? Thanks everyone.

-Joe

 

[Dave Maine]

Can’t tell without seeing your end product. It is really a function of your visual tastes rather than thec tools in use.

 

[Ralph thompson]

In my opinion, LUTS are a bad idea, learn to colour grade properly, develop a style of your own, make your own Presets , plus LUTS are destructive in that they’ll clip highlights (and black point) which are not recoverable.

 

[brett8883]

In my opinion, LUTS are a bad idea, learn to colour grade properly, develop a style of your own, make your own Presets , plus LUTS are destructive in that they’ll clip highlights (and black point) which are not recoverable.

DJI LUTs are just conversion LUTs. They convert D-Log D-gamut to rec. 709. Practically all colorists will use some type of transform wether it be color management, ACES, or conversion LUTs on log footage.

LUTs aren’t destructive and I don’t even know what that means in this context. If you are using conversation LUTs correctly you won’t clip anything. You can manually covert log but that’s a personal preference and for the sake of time almost no colorists do this.

 

[GFields]

Thanks for sharing!

 

[Ralph thompson]

There is no right was or wrong way to colour correct and grade and expect most people find their level of comfort with a workflow. I use different transforms at the start depending on the subject, some are smoother than others but generally quite gentle. But in my experience you make two steps forward and one back from beginning to end. The problem with a LUT (some are very agressive) is you can’t step back. If the LUT blows out say the red channel then it’s gone for good, you can’t pull it back which if you try to continue that flow, will introduce a colour cast. If you methodically colour correct and grade on layers or nodes then you can always go back and pull back the red channel (in this example) then continue your work flow. But this is all personal preferences, once you have a good process, it’s just as fast as LUTS.