A Color Of His Own

Working with Custom Color Looks for Video Projects

I use a package called A Color Of His Own fairly regularly for grading work, and there are some practical things you should know before you dive in. It's not a magic button. It's a collection of LUTs and adjustment templates aimed at giving you a starting point for a specific cinematic palette rather than fixing bad footage on its own. It's a preset library built around a warm, slightly desaturated filmic look with a particular emphasis on skin tones and midtone separation. The core idea is that it gives you a base grade you can then tweak, not a final output you ship directly. People who treat it like a one-click solution usually end up with flat or muddy results, especially on footage that wasn't shot in log or wide dynamic range. The package typically comes as a folder of .cube files plus a couple of preset packs for DaVinci Resolve and Premiere Pro. Here's the straightforward process I follow.

First, drop the .cube files into your LUT directory. In Resolve that's Preferences > Storage, and you point it to wherever you keep your LUTs. In Premiere, it goes under Effects > Lumetri Color > Creative. Reload your project after moving them, or close and reopen the Effects panel so they show up. Next, apply the LUT early in your node or adjustment chain, not at the end. Put it as your first grade step, then build adjustments on top. If you stack it last, you're basically locking in whatever issues your source footage already has and having less control afterward. That's the biggest mistake I see people make with this particular pack. For the adjustment templates included with A Color Of His Own, load them into your respective application's preset browser. They're organized by scenario — low light, outdoor daylight, mixed lighting — so pick the one closest to your shoot conditions and modify from there instead of starting from scratch.

The Real Workflow That Works

Here's how I actually use it on a real job. I shoot everything in log, bring the footage into the timeline, apply the matching A Color Of His Own preset for the lighting scenario, then go through a specific sequence. I start with exposure and contrast, making sure my whites aren't clipping and my blacks have some detail. Then I adjust the temperature and tint to match the scene's intent. After that comes skin tone work, which is where the preset really earns its keep because the designers paid attention to that area. Finally I add any creative pushes like subtle vignetting or grain if the project calls for it. This sequence usually cuts my base grading time from about 45 minutes per scene down to roughly 12 minutes. The remaining time goes into fine-tuning specific shots that need individual attention.

Specific Problems I've Run Into

One issue that caused me a headache on a recent project involved green screen keying. When I applied the A Color Of His Own preset, the greens in the background of the footage shifted enough that my keyer started pulling hair detail along with the unwanted green. The workaround was to place the LUT on a separate merge node below my keyer rather than before it. That way the keyer sees the original colors, and the grade only touches the already-keyed plate. Another edge case came up with footage shot at 60fps that I was grading at 24fps for a festival submission. The preset's sharpening pass interacted badly with the frame interpolation, creating a subtle halation around high-contrast edges. I solved this by turning off the sharpening component in the preset parameters and adding a mild unsharp mask at the end of my chain instead, with the radius set much lower than the preset's default.

Things Beginners Miss About This Tool

The presets in A Color Of His Own are calibrated for Rec.709 output, but a lot of people apply them to HDR deliverables without adjusting the scope readings. If you're working in PQ or HLG, you need to recalibrate your scopes first, otherwise the preset will push your highlights in a direction that doesn't make sense for the delivery format. Check your waveform before and after applying any preset to catch this. Also, the skin tone range in these presets assumes a fairly standard Caucasian to light Mediterranean palette. On darker skin tones, the midtone separation can look flat or slightly muddy if you don't manually adjust the midtone contrast. I found that lifting the midtone curve slightly and boosting saturation in the lower-mid range by about eight percent fixed this across the board for me.

Where It Falls Short

I'll be straight about the limitations. If your source footage is poorly exposed, overcompressed, or shot on a phone camera with heavy processing baked in, no preset will rescue it. The A Color Of His Own pack requires decent quality input to produce good results. It's not a restoration tool. Another downside is the learning curve for people new to node-based grading. The preset structure assumes you understand how to manipulate nodes and scopes. If you're purely a slider-driven editor, you might find yourself fighting with the interface more than actually getting useful results. In that case, starting with simpler preset packs that have fewer parameters might be a better fit until you're comfortable. There's also the question of consistency across multiple cameras. If you're shooting with two different bodies, the A Color Of His Own presets won't automatically match them. You'll need to do manual color matching between cameras before applying the presets, or the final grade will look inconsistent between shots.

Alternatives Worth Considering

If this pack doesn't fit your needs, there are other options. The FilmConvert preset bundles are more camera-specific and handle noise reduction better. Looks Like Film offers a different aesthetic that's more contrast-heavy and saturated. For free alternatives, the open-source LUT projects on GitHub have some solid options, though they generally lack the skin tone tuning that the paid packages provide. The bottom line is that A Color Of His Own is a solid starting point for projects that need a specific cinematic feel, but it works best when you treat it as part of a larger workflow rather than a standalone fix. Understand your source material, know where the presets might struggle, and build your grade around them instead of letting them build the grade for you.