No absolutely not. In Resolve specifically, you have nodes that you apply to the video where each node allows for specific settings to be applied as part of the grade. In a true grading session, you dial in the settings for black levels, white levels, contrast, saturation as primaries. Then there's secondaries which start finessing. You can then draw windows/mattes to isolate a specific area or specific color range (think color image where everything is B&W except the red rose/red car/red dress style) to apply the grading. There's also tracking of those windows. There's so much more going into color grading than "apply LUT here". Just look at the control surfaces for Resolve and the number of knobs/buttons/rollers. Would something that just applied LUTs need all of that?
> You know that when you do color grading with apps like Resolve, it is stored in memory as a LUT, right?
Source? That's a very gross oversimplification of what a color session is like. LUTs don't do tracking. LUTs don't do keys. LUTs don't do mattes.
You are doing colorists a disservice if you think grading is just LUTs.
Drawing windows, mattes, tracking, and other masking tools determine where and how the LUT is applied within the rendering pipeline.
> Source? That's a very gross oversimplification of what a color session is like. LUTs don't do tracking. LUTs don't do keys. LUTs don't do mattes.
I work in AAA games and have written code for tonemapping and color grading. We often use a gbuffer (graphics buffer that could be seen as a 2D screen-shaped image that is never shown) to mask different objects in the scene and apply different LUTs accordingly. So, it is not only LUTs that are applied in a similar screen-space way, but also masking is similar.
> There's so much more going into color grading than "apply LUT here". Just look at the control surfaces for Resolve and the number of knobs/buttons/rollers. Would something that just applied LUTs need all of that?
On a low level, it essentially is about applying LUTs. How you create these LUTs and how you mask their application are crucial aspects of the process. But ultimately, a LUT is applied to pixels. You are talking about the artistry techniques involved in making a LUT and masking where it is applied, which is not debated.
LUTs are not just files you can import and export to grade the whole image or frame. They are a fundamental compact data structure that makes SIMD operations easy, which is why they are used in grading. If you set up a color grading pipeline with nodes in Resolve, it is very likely compiled into one or more LUTs, which are then applied to the frames.
