I don’t know how I did it, but I managed to look through all the LUTs on Resolve. It’s a long story, but I’ve chosen one. If you want the long explanation, read through this. If you don’t like the suspense, skip to the last two paragraphs.
The biggest issue I’ve had with the Schorman preservation file is that the brightness is a little too high. Blacks look like a very dark gray, even in space. This became even more obvious after I switched over to the anamorphic file. The generated black areas on the top and bottom gave it away. So, I knew that I needed to choose a darker LUT to fix the brightness issues. However, this came with its own set of problems, because a lot of the darker LUT’s I found had an overabundance of color saturation. The color on these LUT’s were so high that they were bleeding out. Queen Amidala’s red dress and the lightsaber effects were two big casualties of the oversaturation and could potentially burn your retinas if you looked at them too long.
So, my ideal LUT was going to be one that was dark, but not too colorful. With those two criteria, I found that the two sections of LUT’s that worked the most were Resolve’s signature Blackmagic LUT’s or the “film look” LUT’s. I was tempted to try the “film” LUT’s so that the movie would look more cinematic. Plus, they were the least colorful LUT’s of the lot. Unfortunately, the film LUT’s had extreme contrast issues in several scenes (The force was not strong with the sands of Tattooine, my friend). So that meant I was stuck with the Blackmagic LUT’s.
Of those LUT’s, the v4’s met my ideals the best. Eventually, I went into a toss-up between the 6K Film to Extended Video v4 and the 4.6K Film to Extended Video v4. The 4.6K won out in the end because the 6K looked a little more washed out than the 4.6K. So unless there’s a better alternative, the Blackmagic 4.6K Film to Extended Video v4 is my official LUT source for now. The blacks look very black, which is nice. And the color saturation is balanced well enough, being somewhere between faded and colorful at the same time, if that makes any sense (In the dinner conversation, for example, the browns of Tattooine look faded and pale, yet the skin tones look rich). I would try using multiple LUT’s, but that would take weeks, possibly months. So, I’m just gonna be lazy and stick to this one until further notice. Besides, I’m more worried about the edit itself than I am with how pretty it looks, and this LUT looks good enough.
I’m going to be excruciatingly busy at work this weekend (I’m talking getting up at 4:30am busy), so I won’t be working on the fanedit this weekend. I will resume on Monday when the craziness that is my day job passes.