How to EASILY Color Grade I Log Footage (Insta360 Luna Ultra)

If you just got the Insta360 Luna Ultra and you're not sure what to do with that flat iLog footage, this video is for you. One of the biggest struggles is getting your image to look great without spending hours on color grading. So today I'll show you how to do it in just three steps inside Final Cut Pro, turning that washed out image into a stylized look. I'll also show you how to save it as a preset at the end so you can reuse it anytime. And if you'd rather skip the manual grading, I'll show you an even faster way by applying LUTs, including my own LUT pack with my go-to settings for the Luna Ultra. All right, so I'm now inside Final Cut Pro and I'll be working with footage that I shot in iLog on the Insta360 Luna. When it comes to color grading log footage, there are three steps I always follow. First, I'll apply a conversion LUT, the official one from Insta360, which I'll link down below. It's completely free. This converts the image into a normal looking one so that we have a good base to start color grading. Then I adjust exposure, contrast, saturation, and white balance. And finally, I build a stylized look using color grading tools. Now, if you want the faster route, I'll also show you how to apply LUTs at the end. So let's start with step number one is applying our conversion LUT. Now, log footage is designed to capture as much dynamic range as possible, meaning more detail in the highlights and shadows. So by applying a conversion LUT, we're simply taking that flat footage and bringing it back to a normal, natural looking image. So to do that, I'm going to head down to the search bar and type custom LUT, and I'm going to drag this to this first clip. From here, I can head over to the LUT section and I've already downloaded it and saved it under the Insta360 LUTs and simply going to select the iLog2 Rec. 709. And as you can see, it converted this image into a normal looking one, giving us a good starting point. And by the way, this footage looks great. You could already export it like this, but we're going to take this further and make this image pop more. Now let's move on to step number two, adjusting exposure, contrast, saturation, and white balance. Now, before we get into it, keep in mind that these adjustments are usually very subtle. You don't have to go to any extremes here. Just small tweaks go really a long way. Now for adjusting the exposure, we'll be using the color wheels. Now, when I'm vlogging with the Luna Ultra, I actually leave the exposure on auto and the camera does really a great job from there. So most of the time you don't need to worry about it. So I'm simply going to head up here and add a color wheel. I'm going to name this exposure. Now the color wheels lets you adjust your image in three separate ranges, shadows, mid tones, and highlights. So instead of affecting the whole image at once, you have precise control over each part independently. Now to make sure the exposure is right, I also use the Luma waveform. To open that up, I simply hit command seven. Now you get this visual graph that shows you the brightness level of your image, giving you a direct representation. Now the bottom is pure black and the top is pure white. I use it to make sure nothing goes above 100 or below zero. So nothing is clipped or crushed and all detail is preserved. So we do have some room here in the highlights. So I'm going to drag this wheel up a bit around here. If I go above, you can see that the clouds are overexposed and we lose detail over here. So I'm going to bring this back down. And I do also have some room in the shadows. I'm going to bring that a bit down too. Again, if I go over this, you can see that over here, we lose detail in the shadow area. So I'm just going to reset this and bring this back down a bit. Let's go over here. And here's the before and after. Next up is contrast. To add contrast, again, I use the color wheels specifically by bringing down the mid tones slightly. And what it does is it darkens the middle range of your image, which creates more separation between the bright and dark areas. Just to keep this structured, I'm going to add another color wheel and I'm going to name this one contrast. And then I'm going to head to the mid tones and just drag this part down a bit. And this to me looks great. This is the before and after. While these are subtle adjustments, you can really feel that the image is more punchy and three-dimensional and has more life to it. Let's now talk about saturation. Saturation controls how vivid or intense the colors look. Now pushing it up makes the color more vivid and pushing them down makes it more muted and neutral. Now to get this right, I like to use the vector scope. So I'm going to head over to this icon and then I'm going to select a vector scope. Now in simple terms, it's a circular graph that shows you where your color sits and how saturated they are. The closer the trace are to the center, the less saturated your image is. The further they reach towards the edge, the more saturated. Now what you want to watch out for is the trace going too far out. And that's a sign your colors are oversaturated and will start looking unnatural. I use it as a guide to make sure the saturation looks balanced and doesn't go overboard. So let's add another color wheel and let's name it saturation. And then I'm going to push the saturation slider a bit up, not too much, like so. And this is the before and after. And next up is white balance. White balance controls the overall color temperature of your image. Basically, whether it looks too warm and orange or too cool and blue. And getting it right means your whites look neutral. Now the best way to correct white balance in Final Cut Pro is using the color wheels again, specifically the highlight wheel. So first I'm going to create another color wheel. I'm going to name this white balance. And I'm going to push this away from green because I feel like the image is a bit greenish. So just ever so slightly here. This is the before and after. And on the Luna Ultra, I usually leave the white balance on auto. The Luna Ultra does a really good job. So again, these tweaks are subtle. I don't really overthink this. Okay. Now comes step number three. This is where the fun begins. We're going to create our stylized look. And for this, I'll be using an orange and teal look, which is one of the most popular color grades in filmmaking. The idea is simple. You push the shadows towards teal and the skin tones and warm tones towards orange. And this creates a nice contrast between cool background and the warm foreground of the person's skin, giving your footage that cinematic feel you've probably seen in a lot of movies and travel videos. So let us create another color wheel. And I'm going to name this look. And I'm simply going to take this and push the highlights more towards orange and the mid-tones as well. And then I'm going to push the shadows towards teal. This is the before and after. Now there's another useful tool called the hue versus hue curve, which lets you take a specific color and shift it to another hue, hue meaning color. So let's add that hue saturation curve over here. And here we have the hue versus hue. And we're also going to use the hue versus saturation. So first of all, let's make the blues more teal. So I'm going to select the picker, pick the sky. Now I created this dot over here where we can now shift the blues more towards teal by pulling it up. I think this looks great. And I'm also going to pick my skin tones and shift it a bit more towards red, just a tiny bit. And I'm also going to reduce the saturation on my face by using the hue versus saturation. Again, I'm going to use the color picker, select my face and now pull on this point down around here. I think this looks great. Now, as a little bonus, I'm actually going to add a mask around my face just to brighten it up a little bit. So I'm going to add another color wheel. I'm going to name this mask and I'm going to head over here and I'm going to add a shape mask, which I'm going to put over my face. I'm going to make this smaller and then I'm simply going to increase the highlight a bit, just a tiny bit. Select done. And now when we look at the before and after, it makes a huge difference, right? All right. So there you have it. These are the three steps to create this final look. Here is the before and after. What a change. So now that we have our final look, let's save it as a preset. To do that, select your clip, head over to save effects preset, and I'm going to deselect mask for now. And I'm going to name this orange and teal look. For the category, I'm going to save it to my favorites and then hit save. Now that we saved it, we can apply it to the rest of the clips with just one click. So I'm going to deselect this. I'm going to head to favorites. You can see we saved it right over here. So I'm going to choose this second clip and now I'm going to drag the orange and teal look on top and voila. Now, keep in mind, you might still need to make a small adjustments depending on the time of day, indoors or outdoors, but the preset gets you 90% of the way there instantly instead of having to start from scratch every time. So when we look at the luma waveform, you can see that we still have some room up here so we can head to the exposure and lift the highlights all the way up here. That's it. Looks awesome. Now, if you rather skip the manual grading process, let me show you an even faster way using LUTs. Now, I created two LUT packs specifically for iLog footage shot on the Insta360 Luna Ultra. The first is the iLog Essential LUT pack, which gives you a natural look with the right colors and contrast in just one click. It includes three LUTs, standard for a clean, natural look, rich for more contrast and depth, and fade for a soft muted style. The second is the iLog Creative LUT pack, which is more stylized and cinematic. It includes eight different looks so you can quickly match different moods and styles depending on what you're going for. Now, both are really easy to use, just drop the LUT onto your footage and adjust the intensity to your liking and you're good to go. And by the way, both packs also include my go-to handheld iLog camera settings for the Insta360 Luna Ultra so you can get the exact same look straight out of the camera. They're compatible with Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, basically any software that supports cube LUT files. If you're interested, the link is in the video description below. Let me now show you how to apply these LUTs. I'm going to head down to the search bar and type in custom LUT. I'm going to drag this to this first clip. And over here in the inspector, we are going to select show. And then in the LUT, I've already imported my creative and essential LUT pack. So we're going to start with the essential LUT pack. And here we got the first one, the standard, which looks great. But if we want a more punchy look, we can head for rich. And if we want a more faded one, we can select fade. Let's now look at the creative LUT pack. So let's go over here and then select the creative LUT pack. And let's go with the first one, which looks great. We can also select the second one and you get these eight stylized looks, which all look really great. Now, usually you don't need to make any major adjustments, but if a LUT feels too strong, you can use the mix slider to reduce the intensity. Let's look at some other clips. I'm going to add the custom LUT and let's add the sixth one, which looks amazing. Let's go for number eight. So let's look at this third clip. Again, let's add a custom LUT and go for number two, choose number one. Also nice. And this last clip, let's choose custom LUT and let's go for number seven. So they all work really well. And yeah, it really depends on what kind of style you're going for. And there you have it. That is how I color grade my iLok footage, either using these three simple steps or using my LUTs to add an instant look right away. If you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the comments below. Again, you'll find the link to my LUT pack in the description. Thank you so much for watching. Take care, and I'll see you in the next one.