Color correction and creative color grading of iPhone video to emulate the cinematic look of a big screen motion picture, or professionally finished TV series requires more than a LUT. My goal is to faithfully transform the source image information recorded by the iPhone camera into an image that matches the look of movies captured on motion picture film. Specifically the look we associate with films that were finished with traditional photochemical and optical processes.

This transformation requires a number of steps, not only to emulate the color and tonality of a film print, but also the effects of halation, and if desired mechanical effects such as gate weave. This process also involves reconstructing and enhancing image details lost to source video compression and limited color bit depth encoding.

Here you will find tutorials related to these steps and processes, and the tools and techniques I use to achieve them.