Video Color Grading via Look-Up Table Generation

Different from color correction and transfer, color grading involves adjusting colors for artistic or storytelling purposes in a video, which is used to establish a specific look or mood. However, due to the complexity of the process and the need for specialized editing skills, video color grading remains primarily the domain of professional colorists. In this paper, we present a reference-based video color grading framework. Our key idea is explicitly generating a look-up table (LUT) for color attribute alignment between reference scenes and input video via a diffusion model. As a training objective, we enforce that high-level features of the reference scenes like look, mood, and emotion should be similar to that of the input video. Our LUT-based approach allows for color grading without any loss of structural details in the whole video frames as well as achieving fast inference. We further build a pipeline to incorporate a user-preference via text prompts for low-level feature enhancement such as contrast and brightness, etc. Experimental results, including extensive user studies, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for video color grading. To validate its robustness, we provide our source code and video demo as supplementary materials.