Hi, @Ralph_B.

It's a way to get better looking images with less effort. Existing color spaces are optimized for delivery or capture, not for color correction. You can do color correction in those spaces, but it's more work than it should be and it's difficult to get a perfect result. Exposure compensation, for example, would require a very precisely shaped curve. White balance correction would require separate adjustments to shadows, midtones, and highlights. Some people are used to working that way, but I always found those methods troublesome, so I made something better.

If you're the kind of shooter who always manages to get perfect images straight out of the camera, you won't benefit from this. But for the styles of shooting that I do in the field, often in sunlight and varying lighting conditions, almost everything I shoot benefits from some color tweaks.

The major bullet points here are exactly what Balazar points out: global adjustment of exposure compensation, white balance, and contrast. As with JPEG versus RAW still photography, these properties are burned into H.264 video recordings, regardless of whether you shoot in log or Rec 709 profiles. Normally when grading H.264 footage, you're working in a Rec 709 color space, either natively or converted from a log profile into Rec 709 by a calibrated 3D LUT. In that situation, you must work with the exposure, white balance, and gamma profile that were selected at the time the footage was shot.

Converting H.264 footage into a standardized log color space (in this case a version of ProPhoto RGB), allows exposure, white balance, and gamma curve to be adjusted in post-production, similar to how Adobe Lightroom uses ACR to manipulate these properties in RAW photographs. The color science behind this is well-defined and valid to the level of color fidelity recorded in the original footage.

Regardless of the working color space, what's open to personal opinion is how to best manipulate the footage with post-production tools. As with most photograhic software, Adobe Lightroom treats exposure, white balance, and gamma globally across the histogram range, and provides its own custom controls for separately adjusting highlight, midrange, and shadow properties. For example, the effects of Adobe's "contrast" control vary depending on which process version you select in ACR. It's a subjective interpretation rather than a calibrated adjustment.

With video color grading tools, it's more common to provide separate sets of calibrated adjustment controls for highlight, midrange, and shadow regions, as well as a master set of controls for the entire histogram range. This partially compensates for the absence of a global white balance adjustment, which cannot properly be performed in Rec 709 color space. Balazar's log color space conversion fills in that gap, allowing you to alter exposure, white balance, and contrast within the host application.

What's notably missing is support for Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects, which I'd imagine is not an oversight, but due to more substantial issues?

If only I knew how to use resolve.

Bravo, thanks for making this, I've always wondered no one made a lightroom style plugin for NLEs that actually gave good results.

Coming from more of a photo background, CC and grading has always been painful for me in video.

Love that you made this!

Thanks, @majoraxis. Yes, when you shoot with less than perfect settings in the camera, it won't be as damaging as it would be without Logarist. That's a good way to put it. Logarist doesn't give you unlimited latitude for mistakes, however. You'll still get the best results when the settings in the camera are right. The way I operate is to try to get the exposure and white balance fairly close in the camera. It doesn't have to be perfect. That frees me up to worry about camera motion, framing, and motion. Then I use Logarist to get the colors the last bit of the way to where I want them.

You can get the same results with Sony Cine1 or Cine2. The only real difference is how things will show in the histogram and with zebras while you're shooting.

@Azo, I'm glad to hear it. Which camera did you use?

Hi balazer, any chance for a version which works with adobe premiere pro cc? Works wonderful in FCP Pro x with JVC J-Log. Much headroom, smooth highlights. Thank you for your work..

Amazing, truly amazing work @balazer! I must have eaten s much work and time to develop it. Pity that I can't use it with Magix ProX7

@balazer Sounds like more like a job for After Effects than Premiere Pro. AE can load .cube LUT's into 32-bit linear ProPhoto color space, and the Color Finesse plugin bundled with AE provides those kind of color tools.

Any chance you will support the Panasonic G85

BMD Fusion looks like good candidate

Very nice work. Thanks for supporting Sony cams. I said goodbye to Panasonic a year ago and now I can use your luts again. I liked the CineD to log workflow for the GH4 I had. This is more advanced.

@balazer

Why not to do all this inside plugin including LUTS and adjustments?

As far as I understand you focus on basic adjustments.

Thanks, @RKM. What camera do you use now? It'd be nice to see some samples posted as people start working with this.

@radikalfilm, in my experience RGB sliders are the best way to do white balance adjustment - better than color wheels or a Kelvin slider. I wish all the apps would use RGB sliders. With three sliders you have three axes on which to make the adjustment: the red-cyan axis, the green-magenta axis, and the blue-yellow axis. You only need two of those, but having all three makes it easier. If you are used to Kelvin sliders, treat the blue channel like Kelvin and the green slider like tint.

Vitaliy, I don't want to reinvent the wheel when we already have good-enough plugins for loading LUTs. It's not easy to make a plugin that performs well. It needs to be multithreaded or use GPU acceleration. And I'm not focused purely on basic adjustments. There's a lot of advanced correction that you can do in the log space with video apps' native tools, like masked corrections or graduated filters. I want people to be able to make all those types of adjustments in the log space, which means keeping the application of the LUTs separate from the color correction filters.