Colorgrade Your Film to Look Like a Summer Blockbuster!

Cameras

Juan Melara gives a great tutorial on how to emulate that classic blockbuster blue-warm look. He starts of with some great example footage and comparison then dives in real quickly to show you the LUTs and tricks to fine tune this appearance. This is an easy way to up the production value of your film and isn’t incredibly complicated, just requires some patience, a good eye, and knowledge of Resolve, or your preferred color tool.

I love color and tutorials like this are invaluable and help you approach color with even better understanding. Check his post for even more in-depth information.

Here is Juan‘s pre-requisite knowledge for following this tutorial.

In this tutorial I assume you have some basic Resolve knowledge and you’re able to setup up projects, import footage, apply LUTs and create nodes. I also assume you have a basic grasp of colour correction and colour correction best practices. If you’re new to Resolve or colour correction/grading in general, I recommend you check out some of the resources at the bottom of this post.

He also supplied links to Resolve, his sample footage, and the LUTs he used so you can follow along.

  1. Davinci Resolve. Download the free Lite version from Blackmagic Design.
  2. The footage I use. All the files in their original R3D format can be downloaded from here. If your system isn’t up to the task of handling 5k footage, let me know and I’ll look at creating 1080p/720p versions…
  3. The film print emulation LUTs. Download them here and read this post for instructions on how to install and use them. If you are grading your own footage not in log format, download the video2log Input LUT from here.
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Jared Abrams is a cinematographer based in Hollywood, California. After many years as a professional camera assistant he switched over to still photography. About two years ago a new Canon camera changed the way the world sees both motion and still photography. He just happened to be in the right place at the right time.