Auto colour and saving a grade as a LUT

Two small tools in Video by Zaweba sit at either end of a colour job. Auto colour is a starting point: it looks at the frame and sets white balance and levels for you. Exporting a grade as a LUT is a finishing step: once a look is right, it saves the whole thing as a 33-point .cube file you can carry to another project or another program. Used together, they make grading faster and more consistent.

What Auto colour does

Auto colour measures the frame and sets the clip's white balance and levels from it. White balance is about colour casts, the orange of indoor bulbs or the blue of shade. Levels are about where the darkest and brightest parts of the picture sit. Many clips straight from a phone or camera are slightly flat or slightly tinted, and Auto colour corrects both in one go.

Treat what it does as a starting point, not a verdict. You still have every colour control in the Inspector to refine the result by hand, and that matters, because no automatic tool knows what you meant the shot to look like.

When to trust it and when not

Auto colour works best on shots with a mix of tones and something close to neutral in frame: a wall, a road, clothing, a cloudy sky. It struggles when the whole frame is one colour on purpose. A sunset, a forest or a room lit in red will all be pulled towards grey, because the tool assumes the cast is a mistake.

Clips that change a lot from start to finish are harder, since one frame can't represent a dark doorway and the bright garden it opens onto. Split such a clip if the two halves need different treatment. And treat Auto colour as a first pass. Check skin against the vectorscope's skin line in View, then Scopes, and nudge temperature or tint if faces look off.

Exporting a grade as a LUT

When you have built a grade you like, with curves, colour wheels, sliders and perhaps a secondary, you can export it as a 33-point .cube LUT. The number is the size of the table: 33 steps along each of red, green and blue, which is a common size that most editing and grading programs read.

There are several reasons to do it. A series can share one look across many projects, so episode five matches episode one. A look made in Video by Zaweba can be handed to someone working in other software. And a careful grade on a hero shot can become a quick starting point for similar footage later, loaded through the app's own LUT slot with its intensity slider.

A workflow that uses both

A practical routine for a short film runs like this. Use Auto colour on each clip to remove obvious casts and set levels. Then correct by hand where it got things wrong. Once the shots match, build the creative look on one representative clip or on an adjustment layer. Export that look as a LUT. In the next project, apply Auto colour again to balance the new footage, then load the LUT for the look, and set its intensity to taste.

Keeping balance and look apart like this is the main benefit. The LUT carries the style, and each new batch of footage gets its own correction first.

Things to keep in mind

A LUT records colour changes only. Masks, effects such as blur or grain, and anything that changes over time with keyframes are not part of it, because a LUT is just a table that maps one colour to another. If a look depends on a vignette or a mask, that part needs rebuilding in the new project.

A LUT is also tied to the kind of picture it was made on. Export one from a grade on normal video and it expects normal video. Put it on flat log footage without converting the footage first and it won't look the same.

And don't run Auto colour after a creative grade. Its job is to neutralise casts, and a deliberate look is exactly what it is likely to undo. Balance first, style after.

These two tools are small, but they save a lot of repeated work in Video by Zaweba, especially across a series where every project should feel related.