How to Color Grade Your Video in Final Cut Pro and Create Your Own LUTs in Photoshop

Color grading is one of the important parts of the editing process, as it can give your video footage a very personal look that differentiates it from your peers. This awesome video will show you not only how to color grade your footage, but how to create and save your own looks to apply down the road.

Coming to you from Sean Tucker, this helpful tutorial breaks the color grading process into three phases: primary grade (matching luminance and contrast between clips, particularly if obtained on different devices, as well as correction), secondary grade (using color to to draw attention), and mastering (the final look of your footage). It's a tidy and effective workflow that addresses all issues of color from accuracy and consistency to personal preference. Next, Tucker will show you how to create your own lookup tables (LUTs) using Photoshop. Quite simply, LUTs are mathematical maps that take color data and transform it into different data; it's much akin to a preset for a photo. As you continue editing and developing your style, creating and growing a library of LUTs will allow you to be vastly more efficient in your post-processing workflow and will help to ensure more consistency across your work. 

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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3 Comments

I'm going to start filming, landscape. And this LUT thing has allways been an issue to me, too much time spent on Photoshop and Lightroom, i know nothing of Premiere and such, you people know any good tutorials to catch the basics? (not basics like importing audio and video lol)

Youtube is your best friend to learn stuff for free. If you don't have Premiere or FCP, download the free DaVinci Resolve editor/grader/DAW. No need to give Adobe or Apple any more money than they already have, they both have enough. ;-)

For FCPX head over to Ripple Training