okay so this has been bugging me for a while. i shoot d-log d on my air 2s and i know the whole point is to have more dynamic range to work with in post but honestly every time i sit down to grade the footage i end up spending like two hours on one clip and it still looks kinda washed out or way too contrasty depending on which direction i overcorrect in. its a whole thing.

im using premiere and ive tried a bunch of luts, some free ones from youtube tutorials and a paid pack i bought last year. the paid ones are actually worse somehow? like they look fine on the preview thumbnails but on my actual footage the colors just go weird. i think its because my exposure when shooting is off but im not 100% sure.

does anyone have like a simple starting point workflow they actually use, not the youtube tutorial version where everything looks perfect, but what you actually do when the footage is imperfect. because mine is always imperfect and i need to know what normal people do with that

luts are kind of a trap honestly, especially the cheap ones. they're built on specific footage with specific exposure and if your base image is even slightly off it just looks wrong. what i do now is barely use luts at all. i do a manual primary correction first, get the image looking like a normal correctly exposed image, then do my creative stuff on top. in lumetri thats basically just playing with the curves until the log look is gone, then bumping contrast back in a controlled way rather than just slamming a lut on it and hoping for the best.

also check your exposure before anything else. in d-log your histogram should be sitting more to the right than you think is correct, like it should look pretty bright on the camera screen. if youre exposing like you would for a normal picture profile the shadows are gonna be a mess to work with in post. this was my big mistake for ages

switching to resolve made a huge difference for me but i get that not everyone wants to learn a whole new program. the node based stuff is a bit of a brain rewire at first but the color tools are just way more powerful than lumetri for this kind of work. if you do want to stay in premiere though i think the thing is just to stop trying to make log footage look good with one click. its a starting point not a finished image, which sounds obvious but took me embarrassingly long to actually internalize

also what lut pack did you buy? some of them are genuinely terrible and designed more for marketing than actual use