How I do Cinematic Color Grading in Shotcut the Easy and Lazy Way

Filter order should, for most things, be a matter of logic. For instance, colour grading without first white balancing is a hiding to nothing and saturation needs to be done after grading so you can see which colours, if any, are over or under saturated. Sharpness has to be done last as it affects the reading of the waveform monitor, which would make black and white points invalid if done before grading. Assuming you are using the video scopes, that is!

@DeJay - thanks for the reply. Yes, I already understand that filters are order dependent. What I was questioning is whether the Shotcut filters are applied in ascending or descending order? @bentacular uses White balance first, then adds Color Grading, but he then drags the Color Grading filter above White Balance. This implies priority is ascending order (bottom to top). Yet Shotcut adds each filter in descending order (top to bottom). This seems confusing to me?

Now that this comment about the order of the filters came up, I thought I was wrong.
Perhaps this “trick” in the video is something that works reasonably well and the result is good for most users.
However, when I did some video restoration, the initial step was always white balance, and the last step was sharpness along with grain reduction.

Yes, I think the workflow is sound, but the sort order of selected filters is confusing. Can anyone shed any light on the priority order? Ascending or Descending??

It is top down.

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Then the order in bentaculars demo is just wrong. He shouldn’t change the original order, i guess.
See 7:20 in his tutorual. Probably it doesn’t make much of a difference here - but it could.

Yes, you were right about that. :slightly_smiling_face:

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It’s weird but it’s worked for me. Initially, I always thought it was top down, but when ai started color correction, I noticed that the adjustments weren’t fitting the top down order. It was seeming more like what was the top-most was superceding adjustments from the one below it. In many of my adjustments the order didn’t matter, but in orders, the bottom up order made more sense than the top down when it came to doing what I expected the filter to do. Then again, this technique was developed across many versions throughout a span of 1 year. So, there could have been a bug during one of those versions and it stuck with me as a heuristic habit. I would love to see everyone test it out to see if the layering and its effects should actually be the other way around

This was the tutorial I was holding back for a long time because I knew that there are a million ways to color correct. That is why I usually emphasize in every video that this is “MY” way of doing it not “THE DEFINITIVE” way

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In some some filters across many versions I didn’t see it that way. Maybe I stumbled on a bug on that version

I did a test with a video today. The problem is that I simply couldn’t get a frame as a reference for all the video, because the camera moves from a shaded area to a light area.
Anyway, I altered the order of the filters, namely
White Balance-Color Grading- Sharpness
Color Grading-Balance of Whites-Sharpness
The difference was insignificant visually, but it existed.

Sharpness is also part of my correction that happens at the end after color grading. I just didn’t do it in this tutorial because this focuses more on what is considered color correction and color grading, which usually includes white balance, exposure and grading. Sharpness is done in post and is subjective. People can sharpen it any way they would like

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Yes, I added the sharpening filter, just to test how that video looked and to compare with my other restoration tools. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I usually film with a GoPro with the sharpen set to low, so I’d need to go back after color grading and add 50/25 in the sharpen filter. That tutorial can only be so long that I didn’t want to add other processes that don’t fall under color correction

In your tutorial, there is no need to use sharpness…the girls look great… :sunglasses:

The last video I applied sharpness

It was always top down. It is easy to confirm this by making a simple test:

If the text is applied first, then it would be rotated as well, but it is not. There are some exceptions to this:

  1. Crop: Source is always applied first - even before the automatic deinterlace, scale, and padding.
  2. GPU filters are always groups before CPU.
  3. The Blend Mode filter affects the track blending, which occurs after all clip and track filters.
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Hey @bentacular - it is still an excellent tutorial. What works, works! I think it has been helpful to clarify the ordering, so the outcome is doubly good. Please keep the tutorials coming.

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Thanks Dan - very helpful.

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Wow … cinematics stuff. and LUT – Look Up Table, i know that well in microsoft excel but wow didn’t know this is use too in video making. Lots of stuff to digest how I can apply to video. Another big To Do thingy for me. Thanks all for sharing …

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