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Color Grading — From Zero to Colorist

Log, LUTs & normalization

BeginnerDuration ~12 min video + 40 min hands-onTools DaVinci Resolve (free)

Why this lesson

Section titled “Why this lesson”

This is the lesson that stops you developing the single most common beginner habit — the one that marks amateur work instantly. Modern cameras often shoot in log: a deliberately flat, grey, low-contrast recording that squeezes the maximum brightness range into the file so you can decide how to use it later. Log footage looks broken when it lands on your timeline, and two wrong instincts kick in. The first is to hand-crank contrast and saturation until it looks acceptable — grading log by eye, which is imprecise and never repeatable across a scene. The second, worse one is to reach for a “cinematic” LUT and slap it on the flat image, which almost always clips the highlights and mangles the color because the LUT expected a properly-prepared image. There’s a correct move, it’s fast, and once you know it you’ll never do the wrong one again: normalize log with a defined transform first, then grade. We keep the theory light here — it comes back in full in Level 2 — but the recipe is exact.

Watch

Section titled “Watch”
Watch for: Ignore the word 'ACES' for a second — what Alex is really demonstrating is a color-managed setup, and the whole point is: tell Resolve what camera/space each clip came from and what display you're viewing on, and it does the log-to-Rec.709 conversion for you. Watch the side-by-side where he pulls offset down in a plain Rec.709 timeline and the shadows instantly clip, versus the managed timeline where the shadows compress and hold instead. That protected, natural roll-off is what a correct normalization buys you — and it's why you don't hand-grade log.

The explainer

Section titled “The explainer”

Start with recognition, because you can’t fix what you can’t spot. Log footage looks flat, grey and milky — low contrast, lifted blacks, muted color, like someone left a fog filter on. That’s not a defect; it’s the camera storing a huge brightness range in a way that survives grading. Sony calls its version S-Log, ARRI calls it LogC, Panasonic V-Log, and so on. You don’t need to memorize those yet. You need to recognize the look and know it means “not normalized.”

Rec.709 is the standard the flat image needs to become. It’s the color and contrast standard that normal screens — TVs, laptops, phones, YouTube — expect. “Normalizing” simply means converting the flat log recording into Rec.709 so it looks correct on an ordinary display. After normalization the blacks sit at black, the whites at white, color returns to life — and now you have a sensible starting point to actually grade.

There are three ways to normalize, and only two are right.

  • A conversion LUT. A LUT (look-up table) is a file that remaps every color to a new one. A conversion LUT does a defined technical job — “take Sony S-Log3 and output Rec.709” — and camera makers publish official ones. This works, but it’s a fixed recipe that can clip if your exposure wasn’t spot-on.
  • A Color Space Transform (CST). This is the recommended move. Add a Color Space Transform node (an OpenFX filter built into Resolve), tell it the input color space and gamma (what the camera shot) and the output (Rec.709 / Gamma 2.4), and it does the conversion mathematically, with controls you can adjust. It’s a normalization you understand and can tune, on its own node, early in your tree.
  • Resolve Color Management (RCM). Instead of a node per clip, you set it once at the project or timeline level: tell Resolve your timeline is Rec.709 and tag each clip’s source space, and it normalizes everything automatically — exactly what Alex demonstrates in the video. This is the “set it and forget it” version, and it’s why color management gets pulled this early: it prevents the whole class of log-grading mistakes before you can make them.

Whichever you pick, the crucial distinction is this: a conversion is not a look. Normalizing gets you to correct and neutral — it is not “the grade.” A creative LUT is a different animal entirely: a subjective look someone designed (a teal-orange feel, a film emulation) that you’d apply after normalization, on a later node, as a starting point for taste. The cardinal sin is confusing the two — dropping a creative LUT onto raw log and calling it a grade. Normalize first with a conversion. Grade second. Add a creative look last, if at all.

One more reason to normalize properly, straight from the video: in a plain Rec.709 timeline, pulling exposure down clips your shadows the instant they hit the floor — information gone. In a color-managed setup the same move compresses the shadows, protecting detail the way your eye does. So normalization isn’t just cosmetic tidy-up; it gives every subsequent control a wider, safer range to work in. That’s the entire argument for doing it first.

Do it

Section titled “Do it”

Recipe A — the CST node (do this one first):

  1. Drop a log clip on the timeline — confirm it looks flat and grey.
  2. On the Color page, add a serial node as your first node and label it Normalize.
  3. Add the Color Space Transform OpenFX to that node. Set Input Color Space and Input Gamma to your camera’s log (e.g. S-Log3 / S-Gamut3.Cine), and Output to Rec.709 / Gamma 2.4.
  4. Watch it snap to a correct, neutral image. Check the waveform — blacks near the floor, whites near the top, nothing slammed.
  5. Now grade, on nodes after the normalize node, using everything from 1.3.

Recipe B — RCM (set once):

  1. On a fresh timeline: Project Settings → Color Management → Color Science: DaVinci YRGB Color Managed, Output color space Rec.709 Gamma 2.4. Tag each clip’s input space (right-click the clip → Input Color Space). Everything normalizes automatically.

Then prove the point: apply a creative LUT to raw log with no normalization, watch it clip and go wrong, and compare against the same LUT applied after a proper CST.

Log formats & normalization cheat sheet — common camera log formats, gamuts, CST/RCM recipelog-formats-table.pdf154 KBOriginal course material — free to useLevel 1 workbook — every lesson's Do it exercise, checkboxes, capstone brief & sign-offlevel-1-workbook.pdf571 KBOriginal course material — free to use

Terms introduced

Section titled “Terms introduced”

Check

Section titled “Check”

Check yourself

  1. A clip lands on your timeline looking flat, grey, milky and low-contrast, with washed-out blacks. What is it most likely?

  2. What does "normalizing" log footage mean?

  3. Which is the correct, repeatable way to normalize log — the one this lesson teaches?

  4. What is the difference between a conversion LUT and a creative LUT?

You can move on when you can… spot log footage on sight, normalize it with a CST node or RCM to a correct Rec.709 image verified on the waveform, and explain why slapping a creative LUT on un-normalized log is the wrong move.

Go deeper

Section titled “Go deeper”

Gerald Undone — How to Correct Log & HLG Footage & Make LUTs (reference): a longer, more technical look at the same problem, including how a LUT-based normalization compares with a transform-based one, and how HLG (a broadcast HDR flavor) fits in. It’s a dense livestream with tangents — treat it as a reference to dip into, not a first watch. The theory it opens up (transfer functions, gamuts, camera log families) is exactly what Level 2’s 2.1 and 2.2 cover properly, so don’t feel you need to absorb it all now.

Watch for: [Reference — dip in, don't binge.] The section contrasting a conversion LUT against a Color Space Transform for normalizing the same clip. Note that his ACES-via-OFX approach is now dated; the CST and RCM methods in this lesson are the current way.

Next up: 1.6 · Balancing a shot — where every tool so far becomes one repeatable workflow, verified on scopes.