From the course: Creating a Short Film: 11 Color Grading

Understanding LUTs

- [Instructor] On most professional productions and also in many independent ones, they will use something called a color look up table, abbreviated as L-U-T and pronounced LUT. A LUT is almost like a color preset. It tells software how to interpret the colors. They're often used because they are precise. And oftentimes the director of photography, or DP, will use them to preview the footage as it's shot, so they will expect this LUT to be used in order to get the footage in line with what they were seeing when they shot it. So in those cases, it's best to start your color grade with those LUTs from your DP or your DIT. LUTs can be added in any color software program, be it via the Lumetri Color panel in Premiere or DaVinci Resolve or in pretty much any other professional application that deals with color. But because LUTs are like presets, except they can't even be adjusted really, They don't help us much here in this course as we're trying to understand how to really get our fingers dirty and work with color on a deeper level. So I just wanted to mention LUTs here as they're typically very important, but there's just not much you can do to adjust them. So in this course, we're going to focus our attention on how to actually adjust colors manually so we understand how to really control the final image.

Contents