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I finally see the damage in my old color grading presets
I finally see the damage in my old color grading presets. I pulled up a piece I finished back in March for a client and compared it to the original raw file. The contrast curve I used was way too aggressive, it crushed all my shadow detail and pushed the skin tones into this weird orange cast. Over four months of using that same preset on every piece, I never noticed because I was just tweaking brightness and calling it done. But side by side on my 27-inch monitor, the difference is glaring, like the old version looks muddy and almost flat compared to the new one I rebuilt from scratch. I think the culprit was that I relied on a preset I downloaded from some random artist in 2022, and I never tested it on footage outside of one style. Has anyone else gone back through their old export files and realized their go-to settings were quietly ruining their work this whole time, or do you keep a strict check on your presets? I'm thinking of doing a full pass on my last ten pieces to see how many other pieces are affected.
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shane_hayes1mo ago
Fix that preset by looking at one good frame from each client project next time. I've got a folder called "bad ideas" full of LUTs I swore by in 2021 that now make me cringe. You're not alone, we've all been coloring blind until we see the truth on a second screen.
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