ok so I shoot D-Log M on the Mini 4 Pro and Ive been going back and forth on my color workflow for a while now. what Im currently doing is pulling everything into Premiere, slapping a LUT on an adjustment layer, doing my basic exposure tweaks and calling it a day. works fine but something always feels slightly off, colors look a bit muddy or the highlights are weird depending on the clip.

someone on another forum mentioned they do a first pass in Lightroom to normalize exposure and white balance across all their clips before they even touch Premiere, then they apply the LUT inside Premiere after. seems like extra steps but they swore by it. curious if anyone here has experimented with different approaches because I feel like theres probably a better way than what im doing and I just havent found it yet. also open to hearing if Resolve is actually worth switching to at this point, ive heard people say its much better for this kind of stuff but the learning curve looks brutal

Resolve is worth it, full stop. I resisted for like two years because I knew Premiere and didn't want to relearn everything but eventually made the switch and honestly the color tools alone are worth the friction. the node-based workflow feels weird for about a week and then it just clicks. for log footage especially it handles things way more gracefully than Premiere does, and the free version does everything most people need.

that said your instinct about normalizing clips first is right regardless of what software you use. log footage can vary a lot between clips depending on your exposure settings and if you just throw a LUT on without any correction underneath it the result is pretty inconsistent. i usually spend like 10 min just doing rough exposure balancing before I even think about creative color.

the muddy color thing with D-Log M drove me crazy for months. turned out my issue was actually that i wasn't setting the right input color space before applying the LUT ? Premiere doesn't handle that automatically and i was essentially double-applying some of the log transformation. worth double checking that if you havent already, might be simpler than overhauling your whole workflow