How do you colour grade in 5 minutes with an always satisfying result?

My apologies, I think I better understand what you were asking now.

Starting with LUTs not working well… LUTs are usually designed to be applied to “corrected” footage. If a video has a green cast from fluorescent lights, note that the LUT was not designed to compensate for that, and the final LUT result will be skewed towards green, which could look really bad. Color casts should first be removed by setting White Balance and proper exposure. Then attempt a LUT or a Color Grading filter. Secondly, LUTs are sometimes created at their “strongest” setting. Other editors like Premiere allow you to change the intensity of the LUT to dial down its effect if it is too strong, so the LUT designers err on the side of strong if needed. To simulate an intensity slider in Shotcut, follow the steps on the first couple of paragraphs on the LUT documentation page. Your LUTs may look a lot better at 50% strength.

As for the intuition you requested for a 5-minute grade, the really short answer would be to aim for first making the image correct (White Balance, Levels, Contrast, Saturation) and only then attempt to get creative or expressive (Color Grading, LUT, effects). Without this order, any creative effort could get unpredictably wonky because of problems rippling up from uncorrected footage.

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