A Simple High Quality Video Grading System
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From todays hiqh quality cameras like the Blackmagic Pocket (raw or prores in Film Mode) or the GoPro (Protunes) you get raw videos in flat, logarithmic mode, that are not intended for directed viewing, but are optimized for flexible postprocessing
Raw (Flat) Footage from Blackmagic Pocket (prores) in Film Mode.
However, when you apply the camera-spezific lookup-tables and automatic histogram-stretching (which works well for many average vidoes), you may still get no desirable results.
The same video after camera-LUT and histogram-stretching.
With a handmade color conversion (like you can do them on pictures with an image editor like GIMP), the video looks much better. In this example, we applied a hand-crafted curve and saturated the colors of the shadows a little. We can also morph from one grading into another to accomodate camera panning between different lighting situations.
Hand-graded video.
We can bring this idea further and may "grade" keyframes in many different ways; from sepia-toned monochrome to artistic effects, there are lots of creative possibilities. And you can smoothly morph from one grading to another.
Artistic grading. Just for fun.
With the grading, you can also apply various image enhancements techniques from the underlying command line tools. So whether you want to smooth sensor noise, smooth out camera shake, sharpen edges or whatever you may need: It's at your fingertips, simply coded into VGrades clip description files.