How to use LUTs for your Wedding Video
HOW TO USE LUTS FOR YOUR WEDDING VIDEO
If you want the best looking wedding videos, you must combine a great shoot with a great edit. The right settings on your camera are your starting point. The camera movement and lens choices are your foundation. And your edit, music choice, and color grade (including using our wedding LUTs) is how you polish your product.
Before using LUTs like our wedding LUTs, there are a few beginning steps you must complete.
First, you must color, correct and light balance your footage before starting the color grading process. Using LUTs before properly color correcting and light balancing your footage will not give you the results you are looking for.
What does this mean?
You want your footage looking as natural as possible before you start color grading.
This could mean getting your footage to look as closely as possible to how it looked in person, or to achieve a natural look with good skin tones and proper white balance.
Here are two examples of different scenes in different kinds of lighting:
The first was shot in natural light, and was properly white balanced in camera. But because it was shot in a high dynamic range format, it looks a little less contrasted than I want.
I could add one of our wedding LUTs to the footage as is, but it wouldn’t give the look I want.
So first I will adjust the contrast to achieve the light balance that looks the best. I can use the curves window to pull the whites and blacks of the image where they should be, and to make any other adjustments to lighting I need to.
If the white balance was not set correctly in camera, I could adjust that to achieve a natural look before applying any LUTs.
Once the clip is color corrected and light balanced, I can add different wedding LUTs until I find the one that fits the aesthetic I’m looking for. Depending on what style I’m going for, I can give the footage a more faded look, a more vibrant, contrasted look, or something more modern, and sleek.
Here’s another example of a clip that had some lighting that, while in person gave a nice ambiance, doesn’t look as good in camera or on the screen. The blue LED lights wash out skin tones and are not at all a natural look.
Before adding any of our wedding LUTs, I want to get rid of the blue light disrupting our skin tones. This takes some more advanced color grading techniques. But can really take our footage to the next level.
You can see how adding a LUT to the clip before color correcting the blue tones out doesn’t look that great.
But with some added work to remove a lot of the blue color cast, and restoring skin tones to their natural state, we can then add one of our wedding LUTs, and the result is a beautiful end product.
To get the best looking wedding videos possible, it takes a little science and a lot of art.
The best chance you have for color correcting and light balancing is to have your footage as close to correct as you can in camera. This means getting your camera settings right.
When editing your footage, you can make minor adjustments or major adjustments depending on what your film needs.
Then to finish styling your project, you can add some color grading but using our wedding LUTs to get the perfect look your client loves.