Lumafusion - Color Grading

CVentures

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Aug 28, 2020
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Just a quick note, previous to last night I’ve been using my GoPro on GOPRO COLOR but I see a lot of creators who are using GoPro say its better to use gopro settings FLAT and then color grade it yourself to make everything look better.

So last night i tried this and went out using FLAT. Now I’m in lumafusion and attempting to color grade, I’ve imported some LUTS and tried to adjust on my own but nothing so far looks as good as GOPro Color itself.

I’m sure part of it is that I’m a complete editing rookie and I’m fumbling my way through, ill keep reading and watching tutorials but so far, its been a bust for me. I can make the greens pop green, but then another part of the image is over saturated etc etc etc.

Anyone out there using Lumafusion ? I love editing everything in Lumafusion on my iPad Pro, its quick , responsive and so far i love it. This is my first attempt at trying to color grade with it.
 
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HippoDrone

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I leave all mine in auto as I am too lazy to learn how to do all that stuff, @WEB is quite well clued up on that more technical stuff, he may have some words of wisdom :)
 
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CVentures

Rookie Rider
Aug 28, 2020
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At this point I’m kicking myself, because the grading I’m doing isn’t 50% as good as gopro’s auto color, I’d hate to not be able to put out this short video from last night.
 

CVentures

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Ok I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts on the colors on these stills from the video after grading. Too much or too little and overall thoughts?

DD384758-C68B-40DA-87D9-CF3015A9719E.png
 

scooterwuf

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Color grading is tricky, especially if you are posting on YouTube, or any online platform. If your aim is to show work for broadcast TV, or a film fest, color grading is essential, but when uploading to YouTube, all the work and subtle differences can get lost in the codec YT applies when uploading to it.

I have had some success, but I’ve found less is more. I try t do everything I can to make the image look good when shooting, so there’s less to do in post. If I have to correct something I begin with auto corrections - auto color, auto contrast, etc. ..., and to crush the blacks. After that I’ll tweak a few things like exposure, whites, or saturation.

If the original footage was shoot in 2-4K, and you render down to 1080p you also have more latitude to work with.

- Wolf
 

WEB

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I leave all mine in auto as I am too lazy to learn how to do all that stuff, @WEB is quite well clued up on that more technical stuff, he may have some words of wisdom :)

Here's my wisdom:

Why are you grading?

For what purpose?

Is there a certain look you're going for or is it to match the output of different cameras?

Colours convey emotion. Colours and grading is about enhancing the footage to suit a certain feel of scene etc

The other think is different cameras - No two camera models produce the exact same "colour" - So a base grade is needed on every camera so a scene looks like it was filmed on the same camera. Tricky stuff.

You can't really say if colours are good or bad until you get into the context of the entire video... it's a rabbit hole for sure.

If you're just riding around doing a Vlog, there's no real point fiddling with it as the standard GoPro algorithm (as in "GoPro" colour) is built for just that - masses of saturation to make the footage "pop" - but in the context of using a GoPro in a workflow that's useless as you can't have a sobering scene and then GO PRO HYPER SATURATED PARTY TIME as it just wouldn't work.

You'd use GoPro Flat profile as it's a higher bitrate (I think?) which, for grading, is important as there's data in the highlights and shadows that are disregarded if using the GoPro colours.

Personally if you're going to grade, I pull some of the red/yellows out of it to even out skin tones and turn the saturation down a bit to make things look more natural as I hate the over-saturation hyper HDR crap that every damn camera puts out these days as it's fake as hell - but that's just me, as with everything it's all down to what you want

The other caveat with grading is.... is your monitor calibrated? If not, you don't know what you're grading to which makes the entire process a bit redundant.
 
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Moto Mengy

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I've experimented with shooting my GoPros in flat mode and color grading. It's a lot of work for not much gain IMHO. If I were making films or movies it would be different, but I'm just motovlogging from my Goldwing and for that I find GoPro Color mode much more than adequate. More importantly, it's SOOO much less work!
 
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UncleL

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I will add a few cents into that topic. As I am a sort of so called specialists in really close area I can simply tell you that colour correcting and grading is not that easy at all even with photos. When it comes to video it gets much more complicated. You might even think it's easy, watching someone appling simple LUT's but it's not that simple at all. It might work well on a simple and predictable scene, but in most cases it wont work as expected. It requires a lot of knowledge and skills but also a sense of style. It's really easy to "overdo" the image, not even mentioning video. And using LUT's is actually one of the last things you should do. Before that you should know how to work with all the basic settings. Simplifying that - lut is like a preset with a bunch of settings which you can't control anymore and they usually cause some issues.

Of course there is a lot of advantage in using flat profile and colour grading it in post process but on top of what I already said it requires substantial amount of time to do it right. When you know how to do it, then it's not that time consuming anymore of course, but you need to learn a lot first. So long story short, spare yourself a lot of hassle until you really want and have time to learn. But if you decide to learn - you will get higher bitrate in gopro protune, bigger dynamic range of your frames and much better results at the end.


Here comes I think easier explanation - the image below is a flat profile

DSC01413-3.jpg




Can you make it in photoshop or any other software to look like that? (that's your well graded footage)

DSC01413.jpg



If not, or if it took you too much time, here comes your gopro profile:

DSC01413-2.jpg



Now imagine that's a video. In that picture I did nothing I couldn't do in Davinci Resolve which I'm using for graiding. The question is if you want to play with each part of your video like that and if you will be able to match colours of all those parts together. If not, gopro profile will be perfect.


I also don't know about lumafusion. I haven't heard about any pro's using that for colour grading. Heard something though that it is good for on the go fast edits.
 
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TBRD

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I am too new and too lazy :cool: to do it myself when there is an auto feature. I think your stills look good though.
 

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