Colour Grading Tutorial Round Up

In this round up of tutorials for colorists of every calibre you can learn how to use scopes on your iPad, just how many ways you can colour grade in FCPX,  and get a deeper grasp of ACES.

DaVinci Resolve 10 is out! It’s now out of beta, so head over to Blackmagic Design to download it for free, including an updated manual.

New Resolve 10 shortcuts: “-” copies grade from 2 shots before, “+” copies grade from previous shot. It really speeds up you session.

— Mathieu Marano (@ilovehue) November 5, 2013

As another DaVinci Resolve freebie, Adrien Le Falher is giving away some free LUTS, based on Juan Melara’s film stock emulation LUTS, and ‘manipulated quite a bit’…

My references however weren’t cinematic film stocks exactly, but rather photographic ones. I shoot a lot of a pictures, and my favorite film, especially for skin, is the Kodak Portra 400 UC (now discontinued), so my LUTs are a mix between a more usual “cinematic” look and the results I get from my 120 films.

Creating Film Looks inside Your NLE

In this detailed blog post over on Phillip Bloom.net you can learn how to use Film Convert LUTS inside Adobe Premiere Pro to give your footage a striking film look.

You can also save 10% on FilmConvert plugins with the promo code “ELWYN”, or just click this link to apply it directly.

For Creative Cloud users these LUT’s can be found at: Adobe Photoshop CC/Presets/3DLUTs. They are loaded through Lumetri Looks in Premiere CC. Lumetri presets are again just LUT’s that can be loaded in.

In this lengthy post Oliver Peter’s demonstrates just how many colour grading options there are available for FCPX right now, with many free and paid for plugins. If you like what you see it’s probably worth giving Oliver’s detailed post on grading inside FCPX with Hawaiki Color, a thorough read. In another post over on Revuptransmedia you can download a whole bunch of FCPX color-board presets created by Oliver.

In this short tutorial Kevin P McAuliffe walks through creating a ‘Michael Bay’ look inside Avid Symphony or Media Composer with Symphony options enabled.

Not to leave out FCP 7, check out this round up of 14 tutorials for grading in FCP7 over on PremiumBeat.com.

Colour Grading on a Laptop

Amazing couple of days grading with Shane Meadows. Privileged job to have done. #Resolve10 smashed it on my rMBP pic.twitter.com/daRKyWNJoF

— James Tonkin (@hangmanstudios) September 27, 2013

Colorist James Tonkin, who demoed DaVinci Resolve 10 Beta at the Amsterdam Supermeet, recently tweeted this image of his laptop grading set up. A couple of interesting things to note: James is using an iPad with AirDisplay to hold his DaVinci Resolve software scopes on a separate display. The grading monitor James is using is a Sony PVM-2541 OLED monitor.

In a later tweet Robbie Carman mentioned that Airdisplay is probably 8-bit and compressed and Juan Salvo suggested using wireless HDMI as another, higher quality, alternative.

Understanding ACES

In this hour long talk from the Digital Cinema Society, the Academy Color Encoding Specification (ACES) is explained, and it’s development history and progress outlined by many of the top color scientists and manufacturers involved including Jim Houston the ACES Project Committee Chair.

In this free pdf, visual effects trainer Steve Wright, offers some thoughts on ACES, specifically in relation to workflow colour management.