Sirocco LUT Pack

Twenty one looks for the desert epic. Sun bleached ochre, heat haze, hard light and deep shadow, and the cold blue of night in the same world.

Every look ships twice, once for Rec.709 footage and once as a log conversion with the transform baked in. Forty two .cube files in total.

Four families, one world

The looks are grouped by shooting condition, so you can find the right one in the middle of a session rather than clicking through a list. Each family runs from a subtle grade that will carry a whole sequence up to a full strength hero look.

Each strip below a look is sampled from that look's own output, ordered from shadow on the left to highlight on the right. They are what the LUT actually does, not colours picked to match.

High Sun

Midday, with nowhere to hide

Overhead and hard. Bleached stone, an ochre cast, and a ceiling on the highlights so nothing runs away to white. Five looks.

Dust

Air you can see

Haze, lift and atmosphere. Blacks off the floor, contrast pulled down, colour thinned by everything hanging between you and the subject. Five looks.

Cold Side

When the heat goes out of the day

Dusk and night. Cool skies over warm ground, with skin held back out of the shift so faces stay warm while the sky goes cold. Seven looks.

Blue Accent

Keep the one cold thing

Desert tones kept intact, with a cold element isolated and driven, so a blue eye, a practical light or a costume detail survives a grade that would otherwise flatten it. Four looks.

Measured, not eyeballed

How to use them

Every look is built at full strength on purpose, so there is somewhere to go. For most footage the usable range is a 60 to 75 percent mix. Take it to 100 percent when the look is the point of the shot.

Files are named for the look, with the version in brackets, so you can see what you are loading before you load it: OCHRE [REC709] for footage already in Rec.709, and OCHRE [Log to Rec709] for log material. The log versions have the conversion baked in, so they need nothing in front of them.

Works with

Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Avid Media Composer, Photoshop, Affinity Photo, and anything else that loads a standard .cube file. Mac and Windows.

What a LUT does, and what it does not

These reproduce tonal response, highlight shoulder, shadow toe and colour relationships. They will not give you grain, halation, gate weave or resolution, because those come from the format, the lens and the negative rather than from a colour transform. If you are chasing the full large format feel, this is one layer of it and a good one, but it is a layer.

Results vary with your source. Exposure, white balance, lighting and wardrobe all affect where a grade lands. These are a starting point for a grade, not a replacement for one.