I wanted to have a teal and orange color style look for a short film I'm working on, in post production, but when I applied teal and orange LUTs, that you can download, I felt that it was too much orange and not enough teal. Trees and grass all come out brown, which make is look kind of ugly. So if I wanted to preserve that green, I figured I should just make my own teal, orange and green LUT instead.

So I tried doing that here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnuTeWWrY_I&feature=youtu.be

But as you can see there is weird color noise an artificacts going on in the video. Especially on the actors jacket and pants, as well as his hand, when you see the close up of his hand.

Is there anything I can do to improve my own custom LUT and get rid of those problems?

If it were me I would do the grading in Da Vinci Resolve and make my own "LUT." Not really a LUT at all, per se, but just manually grading towards teal and orange as appropriate. Watch Youtube tutorials on how its done. On set you can control it somewhat by taking colors out of the shot (set, clothes, props) that don't fit that color scheme, and dressing the set (art direction, etc.) and actors in a way that lends itself to the scheme (i.e. colors that will naturally push toward teal or orange when you start grading, rather than having to "fight" with the colors). I know that's not always possible because of budget/resource constraints, but do what you can, is what I mean.

Once you do it for one shot (preferably a wide or medium with a little of everything in it, your "master" shot for grading, if you will), you can copy the grade to other shots and tweak the copies as necessary. I don't see any other way to make it work with precision. Unfortunately it's not a simple "click the teal and orange button" kinda process.

But there's tutorials on all of this.

Apart from the color I’d remove that second to last shot, there’s something not right with it. The hand on the grave is nice but a little too long.

Is there anything I can do to improve my own custom LUT and get rid of those problems?

Without looking at your LUT on some footage I know it's hard to say. I played around creating a number of Orange/Teal LUTs to varying degrees when asked for that sort of look. Have a look at the following clip and if there are any Orange/Teal looks you like just PM me and I can send them to you. All LUTs in the clip were made in Resolve for various trials on a variety of post jobs. Some were used some not. Again any of the LUTs can be re-tweaked and exported again in Resolve should you need to change colors contrast etc.

ARRI, Canon, Sony, Panasonic and Blackmagic LOG & Rec 709 3D LUTs Pack (.CUBE format.) - YouTube

Chris Young

Okay thanks! It's hard to know what look I like best of those cause I think I would have to see it on my footage to tell. Basically the short film I did, takes place in areas of grass and trees mostly. But when I applied LUTS that you can get from online, the trees and grass go brown, which I didn't like. I wanted a teal and orange look where I could still have the green. So I tried making my own, which is more of a teal, green and orange LUT but couldn't get the colors to pass through without their being color noise.

If it were me I would do the grading in Da Vinci Resolve and make my own "LUT." Not really a LUT at all, per se, but just manually grading towards teal and orange as appropriate. Watch Youtube tutorials on how its done. On set you can control it somewhat by taking colors out of the shot (set, clothes, props) that don't fit that color scheme, and dressing the set (art direction, etc.) and actors in a way that lends itself to the scheme (i.e. colors that will naturally push toward teal or orange when you start grading, rather than having to "fight" with the colors). I know that's not always possible because of budget/resource constraints, but do what you can, is what I mean.

Once you do it for one shot (preferably a wide or medium with a little of everything in it, your "master" shot for grading, if you will), you can copy the grade to other shots and tweak the copies as necessary. I don't see any other way to make it work with precision. Unfortunately it's not a simple "click the teal and orange button" kinda process.

But there's tutorials on all of this.

Okay thanks. One of the problems I have when shooting is most locations have white walls, that I am forced to use and the location owners will not let me paint the walls a different color. I would paint the walls if I could, but I can't. So I thought I would change the color of the white walls in post, and making them teal, but it's hard to make the background teal, and keeping the skin separate, so the skin does not go teal too. I watched some tutorials on how to keep the skin separate when color grading, but they do it so perfectly, where as when I do it, I got noise, like around the actors hand, and around his hair as you can see. The skin is not all passing through correctly.

Or when I try to preserve the green in the grass and trees, it's not coming through correctly either it seems. So how do they separate the skin color so cleanly, in these tutorials?

Like in this tutorial, they show how to color grade a scene where the walls are grey behind the actor. At 11:10 into the video, he separates the actors skin from the background, and colors the background a different color:

The Summer Blockbuster Colour Grading Tutorial - YouTube

It looks cinematic, but I don't think it looks fake, but that is just my opinion. So how in this tutorial though, are they able to separate the skin so perfectly, without color noise?

A couple of questions first I guess.

Are you working with 10-bit 422 or better footage.
Are your display monitors working in 10-bit or 8-bit depth
Is your graphics card capable of delivering a 10-bit depth stream via Display Port
Are you using a 10-bit 422 video card like a Blackmagic Decklink card to an SDI 10-bit display
Are the NLE/grading tools you are using capable of working in 32-bit floating point

Really all or most of those requirements need to be met to ensure that what you are looking at is a true representation of what you are manipulating on the time line. Then if you see color noise or breakup on your output it's an indication you may indeed have a problem with your grade. If viewed through an 8-bit chain though it's going to be very hard to know if the color issues you are seeing are the product of your grading or the limited color space of your vision path.

Some LUTs are very bad at handling color correctly. The clip you refer to is all done in 32-bit floating point using Resolve and if I'm not mistaken from memory no LUTs were used in that tutorial. I use Resolve and can deliver artifact free grades without too much problem without LUTs. To achieve that though I'm using 10-bit 422 footage at 500Mbps or better with a full 10-bit display path. Resolve is working in 32-bit floating point but remember Resolve cannot display a 10-bit output from its GUI even with a 10-bit graphics card and Display Port output. If you are using Resolve to really see the quality of its output you do need to be using one of the Blackmagic cards with a 10-bit output to a 10-bit display.

The sorts of grades you are talking about do put a heavy demand on the color space you are working in so you really need to have everything going for you. Also I have found some plugins can deliver a very good result while some others can deliver poor results to achieve the same result. That then comes down to how well the particular plugin you are using is written. All Red Giant's plugs are written in 32-bit floating point and seem to deliver the goods.. so far :)

Chris Young
Sydney

A couple of questions first I guess.

Are you working with 10-bit 422 or better footage.
Are your display monitors working in 10-bit or 8-bit depth
Is your graphics card capable of delivering a 10-bit depth stream via Display Port
Are you using a 10-bit 422 video card like a Blackmagic Decklink card to an SDI 10-bit display
Are the NLE/grading tools you are using capable of working in 32-bit floating point

Really all or most of those requirements need to be met to ensure that what you are looking at is a true representation of what you are manipulating on the time line. Then if you see color noise or breakup on your output it's an indication you may indeed have a problem with your grade. If viewed through an 8-bit chain though it's going to be very hard to know if the color issues you are seeing are the product of your grading or the limited color space of your vision path.

Some LUTs are very bad at handling color correctly. The clip you refer to is all done in 32-bit floating point using Resolve and if I'm not mistaken from memory no LUTs were used in that tutorial. I use Resolve and can deliver artifact free grades without too much problem without LUTs. To achieve that though I'm using 10-bit 422 footage at 500Mbps or better with a full 10-bit display path. Resolve is working in 32-bit floating point but remember Resolve cannot display a 10-bit output from its GUI even with a 10-bit graphics card and Display Port output. If you are using Resolve to really see the quality of its output you do need to be using one of the Blackmagic cards with a 10-bit output to a 10-bit display.

The sorts of grades you are talking about do put a heavy demand on the color space you are working in so you really need to have everything going for you. Also I have found some plugins can deliver a very good result while some others can deliver poor results to achieve the same result. That then comes down to how well the particular plugin you are using is written. All Red Giant's plugs are written in 32-bit floating point and seem to deliver the goods.. so far :)

Chris Young
Sydney

Okay thanks. I'm pretty sure the footage was shot in 10 bit 422. The DP's camera we used was the Sony A7sII.

I think my monitor is 8 bit depth, and I think the video card is a 10 bit one ,but it's not the blackmagic one.

Perhaps LUT is the wrong term. I thought that a LUT was a color grading formula, with one or more qualifiers in them, such as qualifying the skin or something like that.

I followed the formula like in the tutorial where I tried to separate the skin to be colored separately, but could not get a total separation.

So I guess LUT is the wrong term, and I should have said my own formula, or something like that, rather than my own LUT.

However, I have applied real LUTs that I downloaded to the same footage, and it looks completely fine on my movie. No color noise, or pixel problems. But I don't really like the look of those LUTs and wanted to come up with my own color formula, and qualify the skin myself. But when I do it, I cannot get a clean separation compared to LUTS you can download.

So therefore, I feel that the problem is something I am doing when it comes to the qualifying, and not the footage, cause other LUTs work on my footage, and the computer can display them just fine. So wouldn't the problem be my skin qualifying therefore?

My limited experience as an amateur colorist (I spent about two months, yes for real, on a less than 3-minute music video) is that, as sort of stated above, you have to have the colors in the scene working for you already to push them toward the color scheme you want, or youre gonna have problems. My experience was that noise issues come when youre trying to qualify something that doesnt want to be qualified because the range of color/luminance/saturation is too broad, or too similar to what you want to isolate it from.

There are tricks to combine qualifying techniques to get the perfect noise free mask, but mostly what I ended up doing was backing off how aggressive my selections were until the noise went away, if I could live with results, or even more mostly rotoscoping. Resolve has a good tracker but it’s not magic, and at a certain point you may have to go frame by frame and animate masks. Thats one reason I spent that much time on my project.

Do you have lights? You can maybe light those white walls with a color cast (blue/teal) and your people/skin tones orange to create the separation you need to grade it that way in post.

Okay thanks. I thought lighting the walls with lights, but I was told it would look strange to audience, like the audience would be thinking, why is the wall lit to be blue, rather than making it look like it's already blue in post.

As for a masking, I've tried that before, but have had worse results, because the masks are actually less accurate in capturing the skin than keying it out. With a mask, you can see parts of the mask that do not match naturally around the outline of the face and hair, and you can see changes during movement, where as a chroma key actually does a better job. It has noise problems but still seems to be doing better than masks, unless I am doing the masks wrong.

For indoor scenes, I can try control it so that there is nothing else in the scene that is the same color as the skin. But for outdoor scenes shot on streets, it's difficult to control that it seems. But I noticed that LUTs you can download do a better job at separating the skin than I can do. So I am still trying to figure out what they are doing differently though, cause the skin is perfectly qualified on the LUTs you can download. So I think the problem is on my end, rather than the footage, not being shot right, or anything like that.

This is just my theory but I think how the LUTs work is that instead of separating the actors skin, the luts have it programmed in them to sense the color of skin and just color it orange. That way, no skin is being keyed out, causing noise issues. A color is being added on, rather than being separated. Could that be why other luts work so well?

Depends on how its lit, if you cool the shadows and warm the highlights, and they’re both on the wall and person then the color adjustment will show up in both. Like Josh said the only way to separate them is tracking a mask which is time consuming. If the scene was lit that the wall was in shadow then cooling can be applied to the wall without the mask.

In addition the color quality and depth or lack there of is one of the biggest limitations on what you can do. I had a client bring me interviews shot on an A7IIs that wasn’t lit properly. As a result the colors were muddy and there wasn’t much that could be done.

Okay thanks, but when I use downloaded luts and apply them to the same footage of mine, it tracks the skin perfectly though. So I don't think it's my footage, but something I am doing in the color grading wrong. Cause why is it that the LUTs are able to track to the skin perfectly, otherwise?

Well let’s say the face has a pinkish hue and the wall doesn’t if you modify that color it will only effect the face. What I was describing before was modifying the colors based on luma. Color grading is a specialty on to itself.

Oh okay, but are you saying that it's possible to modify the face without modifying the wall, without a qualifier?

My advice, if you want a definitive answer take it to a professional color grader. Ask him what you want done he will tell you if it is possible. Pay him to do it or pay him to explain how to do it.

You’re diving into a deep pool for the first time and expecting immediate results. There is a lot more to color grading than dropping on the right LUT.

Okay thanks, but I don't want to find a color grader for everything I do, cause I feel like the more I can learn to do myself, the better, and the more I can get done myself.

I want to learn more and improve my knowledge, which is why I asking :). I don't want to use LUTs, which is why I tried coming up with my own formula. I just want to unlock the secret as to what the LUT is doing, to make the skin isolation work. How do you find the secret to what it's doing to the skin precisely?

Yes given certain tools and images manipulations you can create a whole range of looks without using LUTs. The following images are taken from the clip you referred to and have not been touched in Resolve. The skin tone alone in the second image has been adjusted purely using Colorista. Obviously the YouTube image is not a great one to manipulate so the quality isn't the best but it gives you an idea what good tools can do very quickly without having to use a qualifier or mask.

A useful tool for sorting out complimentary colors and their levels for schemes like orange and teal is the Adobe color app.

https://color.adobe.com/create

Select 'Complementary' on the left to see your complementary colors then select RGB on the lower left if you want to see what the individual RGB levels you are using once you have dialed in the scheme you like, dial using the circles on the color wheel. You can then use these values in other grading app to speed up the process.

A quick look at what Magic Bullet is capable of if you are newish to color grading. It is easier to get to grabs with than Resolve plus it has a whole stack of presets you may be able to use, which can of course be modified and saved as your presets.

Red Giant | Episode 22: Creating a Summer Blockbuster Film Look - YouTube

Chris Young

Okay thanks. But if I want a look that requires separating the skin and coloring it a different color, what are the luts doing to the skin specifically to do that? I don't need to use luts but I need to know what the are doing specifically, so I can try to master it.

As I said no LUTs involved in this example. If you look at the second picture you will see the changes to skin color have been achieved purely by selecting the skin tones and adjusting them in the Colorista control panel. The Colorista 3 and 4 way correctors are very discriminating in the manipulation of specific colors. In the second picture the 3-Way Color wheels show you that five values, 2 x Hue, 2 x Saturation and 1 x Lightness have been adjusted. That shows you exactly what the adjustment to those five values has done to the image. Now if you were to create a 3D LUT from the altered image those five values would now be embedded into your new LUT.

So what the new LUT is doing to your image totally reflects the changes you made to the skin tones and in answer to your question "...what are the luts doing to the skin specifically to do that?" is answered. The colors you changed and embedded into your new LUT are what is doing "that" to paraphrase the last part of your question.

The new LUT when applied would now apply those skin tone changes that you made and saved into your LUT to the new image... if the new image contained the skin tone values of your original image. In many ways I prefer not use LUTs and grade from the base image using the tools in Resolve and Red Giant and other OFX plugins that will work in OFX hosts such as Resolve.

Chris Young

As I said no LUTs involved in this example. If you look at the second picture you will see the changes to skin color have been achieved purely by selecting the skin tones and adjusting them in the Colorista control panel. The Colorista 3 and 4 way correctors are very discriminating in the manipulation of specific colors. In the second picture the 3-Way Color wheels show you that five values, 2 x Hue, 2 x Saturation and 1 x Lightness have been adjusted. That shows you exactly what the adjustment to those five values has done to the image. Now if you were to create a 3D LUT from the altered image those five values would now be embedded into your new LUT.

So what the new LUT is doing to your image totally reflects the changes you made to the skin tones and in answer to your question "...what are the luts doing to the skin specifically to do that?" is answered. The colors you changed and embedded into your new LUT are what is doing "that" to paraphrase the last part of your question.

The new LUT when applied would now apply those skin tone changes that you made and saved into your LUT to the new image... if the new image contained the skin tone values of your original image. In many ways I prefer not use LUTs and grade from the base image using the tools in Resolve and Red Giant and other OFX plugins that will work in OFX hosts such as Resolve.

Chris Young

Okay thanks. When you say the skin tones have been selected and colored separately, that is exactly what I did in my footage, when I didn't use a lut. However, the skin tones were not extracted completely accurately, which is why I have color noise issues. How do you select them accurately, without noise, in a color grading program?

Usually when you have noise issues as you describe it indicated that the 'strength' of the codec possibly combined with the actual bit path and color depth of your footage may all be contributing to the noise in the areas you are working especially if you are pushing the grade pretty hard in those areas you are making the changes. Even 10-bit 422 footage especially in 709 type files, i.e. not RAW or LOG files can show grading degradation when pushed too far. Generally RAW followed by LOG has the greatest ability to take serious grading. That's given the proviso that you can see what you are doing and as I mentioned before to ensure that what you are seeing isn't a result of your grade you really do need a 32-bit floating point work space outputting through a 10-bit 422 graphics path, graphics or video card capable of putting its output to a 10-bit display.

Even given that all of the hardware graphics path meets the 10-bit qualification if you are still seeing issues then you can be fairly sure the problems lie on your timeline and the software you are using. For example with both Premiere and Vegas there are color grading tools that work in 32-bit depth but there are in both of those bits of software some tools that are only working in 8-bit depth. If some of those 8-bit tools are used regardless of the fact you are working in a 10-bit space that footage will be processed in 8-bit color space. Then on your final output if you go back to a 10-bit color space you will suffer concatenation which is the inability of the 255 levels of your grade to translate correctly to the 10-bit color space of 1023 levels. This then becomes noticeable as banding with noise issues on gradient color changes. This can be a difficult enough issue to sort out on what exactly is causing noise issues when you have the equipment and software right in front of you let alone over a bunch of posts like this.

If working in 8-bit space I have often used a piece of software that is pretty good at keeping 8-bit color depth together. With this software you export a still from your timeline. This will generally be an 8-bit image. You then import this image into this software where you can now grade to get the result you want. Once you have a result you are happy with the software can then export a 3D LUT that works very well in 8-bit color spaces. You can download a trial of the software and give it a go and see if approaching the problem from this angle gives you any better results. Have a look at the following video and see if it's an approach that may work for you. I use it's color match tool to color match different cameras very quickly and simply and then export a LUT for the camera or cameras I need to have adjusted. Like any software there is a learning curve but this software has one of the most intuitive and quickest learning paths around and it can give your color grading a great boost in capability especially if working in 8-bit color. Check out for other tutorials on 3D LUT Creator Pro on the tube.

Chris Young

3D LUT Creator Introduction 2016 - YouTube

Okay thanks, but when I apply LUTs that you download, I don't have noise issues, cause the luts that you download qualify the skin perfectly, and no issues.

So what are those luts doing differently, that they are doing better, compared to when I try qualifying the skin myself. Since downloaded luts work perfectly fine, it's not the footage, but something I am doing when trying to qualify.

Two things.

1. The LUTs you have downloaded sound like they were generated from well graded sources.
2. You haven't qualified what software, bit depth, graphics path etc you working with.

Maybe what you are attempting is beyond the tools you are using. Maybe something you are doing isn't the correct way to do it. For example Resolve has specifically recommended a particular order for grading steps to ensure best results. It's called the 'Grading Order of Operations.' serious moves away from the recommended order of steps does introduce various artifacts. With Resolve it is fairly easy is to follow these steps as they publish a chart showing them. I have never seen a grading workflow of recommended steps from any other video NLE or grading app. I'm not saying they don't exist. My experience though has been that if the Resolve grading workflow is used in other grading apps they tend to deliver the best results. Again this is a matter for exploration in your workflow using your chosen tools.

Chris Young

I tried Resolve from that tutorial, but perhaps I didn't do everything completely right then. However, the color noise happens right when I separate the skin tones. So is there anything you can do after that will fix it, since it's already damaged once it's done, it seems? In that order of doing things though, it does not saying anything about separating the skin color, so it won't be colored along with the rest, in those steps though.