My kneejerk opinion is that I prefer the orange look screenshots to the kitchen-sink ones. I do like the greater contrast of the kitchen-sink screenshots and I think the color choices are good, I just get the urge to adjust the brightness or exposure on them because they look too dark to me in most cases. That is probably just me or something that wouldn’t be as obvious in-motion, I dunno.
No, I think your eyes are seeing it right. Because one grade is on a timeline, and the other is arranged by individual clips, it’s hard for me to make a clear comparison in the editing room without pressing a lot of buttons. Looking at them side by side in screencap form, though, I think you’ve hit the bullseye.
In defense of the kitchen sink, though, I do agree that the contrast is fantastic! The orange look and the kitchen sink grade used different techniques for the contrast. The orange utilized the secondary dials (Contrast and pivot), while the kitchen sink used what is known in the industry as an S-Curve. I think this test proves that the S-Curve is far superior.
I could get a best-of-both-worlds scenario by giving the orange look an S-Curve instead. I’ll play with that over the next few days and post screencaps of my findings.