How to give a video a cinematic colour look
Get a film look in Video by Zaweba by applying a built-in look or a .cube LUT, then shaping it with curves and colour wheels.
A cinematic colour look comes together in two stages in Video by Zaweba. Start with one of the twelve built-in looks or a .cube LUT, setting its intensity so it isn't overdone, then refine the result with curves, the shadow, midtone and highlight colour wheels and the basic colour controls. It's all free and runs on your own PC.
There's no single cinematic look, but most share a few traits: controlled contrast, slightly lifted or crushed shadows, a deliberate colour bias and skin that still looks like skin. The tools below let you build any of them.
Getting the basics right first
A look applied to badly exposed footage just looks bad in a new colour. So begin with correction. In the Inspector's colour section, set exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites and blacks until the image has a full range without clipping, and use temperature and tint to get white things white. Auto colour can set white balance and levels from the frame as a starting point.
View > Scopes helps here. The waveform shows whether the brightest and darkest parts are pinned at the limits, and the vectorscope's skin line shows whether faces sit where they should.
Adding a look
Now choose a built-in look and try each one against your shot. Intensity matters more than the choice; most looks are better at half strength than full. If you have a .cube LUT you like, from a colourist or a set you've downloaded, apply it with its own intensity slider in the same way.
If your camera records in log, use the input LUT slot (.cube or .3dl) or set the clip's input colour space first, so the footage is converted to normal colour before the creative look goes on top. Applying a creative LUT to flat log footage gives muddy results.
Shaping it with curves and wheels
Curves give the contrast its character. A gentle S on the master curve deepens shadows and brightens highlights. Lifting the bottom point of the curve gives the soft, faded blacks of many films; the faded film control does something similar in one move.
The colour wheels set mood. Pushing the shadows slightly towards blue and the highlights slightly towards warm gives the well-known teal and orange contrast, which flatters skin against cooler backgrounds. Small moves are the secret; a wheel pushed hard looks cheap.
Hue curves and the secondary key let you go further, such as calming one colour that fights the look, or bringing skin back to natural if a strong grade has turned it odd.
Keeping the whole film consistent
A look should hold across every shot. Copy and paste the grade between clips, or put the look on an adjustment layer from the Graphics menu so one grade covers a whole section of the timeline. Colour match can nudge a clip towards a reference clip when shots from different cameras disagree.
View > Colour page gives a dedicated layout for this, with the clip grid across the top and a before and after split, so you can step through every shot quickly.
When you've built a grade you love, export it as a 33-point .cube LUT and reuse it on the next project, in this app or another. A consistent look across a series is a large part of what makes it feel cinematic.
