To obtain a look similar to the great Hollywood productions, the colors of the film can be corrected to give a dramatic look to the scenes. It can be done manually, but also using LUTs, presets that can be downloaded from the web.
One of the aspects that most of all allows you to distinguish an amateur movie from a professional one at a glance is the quality of photography. And not only as regards the use of lights and shadows to bring out or hide parts of the scene in order to underline the plot of the film, but also for the color. Many amateur movies tend to have flat colors, all similar to each other and tending to gray. It is partly due to the use of low-end cameras, but partly also due to the lack of a correct color correction. To get the classic Hollywood look, in fact, an expensive camera is not enough, and indeed often it is not even much needed. The fact is that in large productions the colors of the images taken are never left as they come out of the sensor, but are corrected to give drama to the scene. The trick is always the same, and is divided into two phases. The first is that of shooting: at that moment you have to set up the video camera to shoot the greatest possible range. By now, many semi-amateur cameras (around 500 euros, as a cost) offer excellent results and allow the selection of the gamma curves. The gamma function is used to decode the luminance (ie “real” brightness, with the image projected on the screen surface) of an image on screens that do not project light linearly. In a nutshell, it is a correction mechanism for light intensity, because the value that is recorded by the sensor (or projected by the screen, depending on how you look at it) does not have a linear correlation with the real brightness. The correlation has precisely the shape of a curve, and depending on how you draw it, different results are obtained. In particular, there are some types of logarithmic curves specially designed to maximize the chromatic and luminous range. On Canon devices it is called C-Log, while on Sony it is called S-Log. They are not usually set by default, but in the configuration of your video camera you can choose the various gamma curves, therefore selecting the logarithmic ones. The reason why they are not the predefined curves is that they are not designed to give a definitive image, but on the contrary to provide an image with the greatest amount of bright and chromatic information, so that you can then correct the colors during video editing. And we come to phase number two, that is, postproduction. Having images produced with gamma curves that guarantee a wide luminous range, the colors can be changed with Kdenlive to obtain the desired result. There are various methods to correct colors digitally: it can be done manually with special effects, or automatically using a LUT, Look Up Table. It is a file with presets that can be loaded to give the movies a distinctive style, thus automatically correcting the colors and brightness. As always, you can see the example video at the following address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUHK4GMSbjM
Where to find LUTs
One of the good things about LUTs is that they are fairly standard: as long as you have a.cube or.3DL format, most programs can open these files. And this also includes Kdenlive. Therefore, the same LUTs that are produced for other software (such as Adobe Premiere or Lightroom) can be used. There are many LUT packages, some free and some paid, are easily found on the web. For example, the sit or https://luts.iwltbap.com/ offers a hundred LUTs for $ 25. A valid aspect of this site is that it allows you to test the LUTs online by uploading a frame and observing the effect, before buying them. Some free LUTs are also available.
Retrieve .cube files
LUTs are simple text files, they take up little space
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The camera settings
Choosing the right encoding results in higher quality movies
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Apply the Look Up Table
Using the appropriate effect, the LUT is applied to a clip
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Manually adjust the clip
In addition to the LUT, other effects can be used to manually correct the colors
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