Beautiful Life Studios BC

Colour Grading

This guide is intended to align all editors with the Beautiful Life Studios brand when colour grading footage. The goal is to maintain natural, true-to-life tones with consistent skin tones and accurate colours.

Overall Brand Aesthetic

  • Skin tones: Always aim for natural, healthy, and accurate skin tones. Avoid overly warm or orange tints, or washed-out pale tones.

  • Environment/Backgrounds: Colours should feel realistic and balanced, reflecting the natural lighting of the scene.

  • Contrast & Saturation: Keep contrast moderate, enough to give depth without crushing shadows or blowing highlights. Saturation should feel lifelike; avoid oversaturated colors.

  • Mood adjustments: Minor tweaks to warmth or contrast are fine for storytelling, but never at the expense of skin tone accuracy or realism.

Grading Mistakes to Avoid

  • Overly warm/yellow/orange skin - Looks unnatural; breaks consistency

  • Washed out / flat colours - Feels lifeless; loses depth

  • High contrast crushing shadows - Detail is lost; harsh look

  • Overly teal/cool tint - Unnatural; can make skin look sickly

  • Weird colour casting that make white dresses or black tuxedos look off colour or blue-ish

USING LUTS

We use LUTs to create a consistent baseline for our footage while keeping our natural, true-to-life brand look. Our workflow is simple: apply the LUT first as a starting point, then fine-tune individual clips for exposure, color, and tone.

Brand LUTs

  • Camera Footage: THEWAYOUSEE.cube

  • Drone Footage: DJI Mini 4 Pro D-Log M to Rec.709 V1_.cube

Download LUTs here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1oUw5EeTaFC70cgiT_twp3OL2mkKg9V3p?usp=sharing

Recommended Workflow

  1. Apply the LUT to a single adjustment layer over your entire sequence.

    • Use THEWAYOUSEE.cube for camera footage.

    • Use DJI Mini 4 Pro D-Log M to Rec.709 V1_.cube for drone footage.

    • This creates a consistent baseline across all clips.

  2. Primary Corrections per Clip

    • Go through each individual clip and adjust exposure, contrast, and white balance as needed.

    • Ensure skin tones remain natural and the overall look stays true to our brand.

    DO NOT use multiple LUTs on a clip at the same time. Applying more than one LUT to a single clip can quickly break the footage and make it very difficult to maintain our brand look.