Cinematic Color Grading in Final Cut Pro with EMUL8

Corporate greed annoys me big time, and it's all too common nowadays. One of my favorite plugins of all time is Dehancer, a great film emulation plugin (I have a lesson dedicated to it in my color grading masterclass). But like many companies, they've jacked up prices a crazy amount and moved toward a subscription model so they can own our art and laugh their way to the bank.

If you're looking for a film emulation plugin, I highly recommend not buying Dehancer. Because you don't need to anymore. Two awesome German creators, Christian Maté Grab and Eric Lenz, put their minds together and, with a little German innovation, created EMUL8. They call it EMUL8; I call it the Dehancer killer. It's not a subscription, it's a fifth of the price, and it works just as well on your footage.

One clarification Eric wants me to make: this is not a color grading plugin. It's a finishing plugin, a way to make your graded footage look more cinematic. But he underplays how great the built-in looks are: in most of my examples I barely graded at all. The looks did the heavy lifting.

Setting up

Find EMUL8 in your effects browser (tip: click any effect and press the first letter of what you're looking for to jump right to it). You'll see preset versions, including Christian's preset and Eric's studio preset, but the main workflow uses two pieces: the clip-level effect (select your clips, double-click the one labeled "clip") and the look development effect for an adjustment clip.

The clip effect gives you an ordered set of standard color controls in the inspector, essentially an order of operations for grading each clip: contrast, balance, tweaks. It doesn't do anything automatically; it just organizes the process. (There's also a tool for matching footage from different cameras, which Eric covers on his channel; here we're working with one camera.)

Then press Option A, Final Cut's shortcut for an adjustment clip, and apply the look development preset to it. Everything on the adjustment clip affects all clips underneath. It auto-applies density, look designer, bloom, halation, and grain; I like to switch everything off initially and start in the look designer.

Match your clips first

In the look designer, choose your camera (mine was shot on RED; they've included just about every camera system), then pick a look, choosing between neutral exposure and ETR (exposed to the right, for when you deliberately overexposed your log footage slightly for a cleaner image). Use one look as a temporary template, because before the look can shine, your clips need to be uniform.

Press Control Command 6 for the comparison viewer and save a reference frame (you can store up to 30). Then work clip by clip on the clip-level controls: exposure and contrast first (watch that lowering global exposure doesn't crush your blacks; lift them back if needed), then balance. Pull up the vectorscope and use the global hue slider, pushing away from whatever color contaminates the shot, ping-ponging your eyes between the viewer and the scope until skin lands on the skin tone line. Hold Option while dragging any slider for a slow, fine adjustment. Log footage graded before the Rec 709 conversion gives you huge highlight recovery, so bright shots come right back. For stubborn casts (one shot had magenta in the skin), use the midtones hue slider, since skin lives in the midtones, and if skin ends up too saturated, EMUL8 includes a skin tab with Hue vs Sat where you can pick the skin with the eyedropper and pull it down.

Audition the looks

Here's a killer trick: press Option Y on the look-development adjustment clip to create an audition, then swap looks in each audition copy. Cycle through them with Control Option and the arrow keys to flip between fully rendered looks on your footage. And somehow Eric built the looks so that once your clip exposure is set, the looks don't shift your exposure, none of that "this LUT is radically darker" nonsense. The 16mm look gives you a strong teal and orange push; Fincher is dark and gritty (think David Fincher films). I went with 16mm for this ballet sequence.

The finishing toys

Density: adjusts color intensity the filmic way, making colors richer instead of digitally brighter. I skipped it here, but it's lovely.

Film compression: compresses the highlights, dimming them slightly for that non-digital roll-off. I use this constantly. Play it against the white point slider.

Vignette: I'm so glad they added this, because Final Cut's vignette is garbage. This one is subtle and soft even when you push it.

Bloom: a glow around the brightest parts of your image, like a mist filter on your lens (I keep a 1/4 mist on all my lenses, always). Choose the mist strength in stops (1/8 is a nice middle), then ping-pong the threshold and source limiter until it's hitting only what you want, and keep it off the skin. Pollution extends the glow across the shot; I'd leave it near zero. Hue shifts the glow cooler or warmer.

Halation: the glowing red edge around contrasty areas that happens naturally in the film process. Use the mask mode they thoughtfully included to see your selection, set strength (standard, bold, or, I kid you not, nuclear), then my advice: set the threshold so only the very brightest parts are selected and find the right source limiter amount. So pretty. Me likey.

Grain: maybe you hate it, maybe you love it, but now you have it. My approach: film resolution all the way sharp so the grain stays crisp, a decent amount, and chroma swung left for monochrome grain. Look at that, boys and girls.

Save it and go

Hit Save Effects Preset, name it something like "EMUL8 teal and orange," file it in a custom category, and it's one double-click next time. Different footage in different locations will always need per-clip attention, because with color grading, like anything in life, if you want it to look good you take your time on it.

End result: accurate skin, great color separation between her skin and the cyan background, done fast. Grab EMUL8 here. You'll get the film look, support independent creators, and say no to corporate greed all at once.