Ungraded Dragon footage looks so good, grading actually makes it worse

[Karim D. Ghantous]

I'm not aware of any other camera that has RAW footage as nice as this, save for other RED models.

Taken from: https://jonnyelwyn.co.uk/film-and-video-editing/using-luts-to-match-a-real-film-look/

BTW can people stop over-grading? That Superhero LUT looks awful. It's not 2002 anymore, people, so stop trying to copy The Matrix.

 

[J.D. Frey]

I like the ungraded shot the best, the other "looks" are just too heavy.

MATRIX SODIUM LIGHTS FTW!!!!1!!
(Also that matrix look was totally stolen from Dark City)

 

[Dermot Shane]

"good gradeing"
and
"apply a random destructive, crappy maths LUT"
are far from the same thing
and yea i am well aware of other camera's with just as good RAW footage, the usual suspects...
gradeing a commerical shot on Dragon today, worked on diffrent commerical shot on film yesterday, and a commerical shot on Alexa the day before
have three features on my system, two shot on Alexa, one on Helium
all look great with the RAW (or 6k log scans) into ACEScct
all benifit from gradeing
none came near a random, destructive, crappy maths LUT ;-)

 

[Zack Birlew]

Even with RED One MX footage, I'm seeing that some shots in my first feature only really need a slight tweak of Lows/Mids/Highs to be technically perfect. Because of all the various VFX in the film we're going to denoise and use Filmconvert to add film grain over everything but it's very nice to see the footage looking like it was on set for the most part right out of camera, unlike all of these flattened out LOG and combo LUT looks that you almost have to do with non-RAW or 8-bit workflows. I especially don't like the flat LOG look and that workflow, I think it would mess you up more often than not although I understand the idea of it and what it's supposed to do exposure-wise.

 

[rand thompson]

Like Zack,


Sometimes a simple "Correction/Enhancement" is all you need to make a image look better. I've seen some beautiful "Color" grades like in Karim's example above and they look great when appropriate and help to tell the story you are trying to tell.