I have been a fan of Steve Chan’s channel, DSI Pictures for many years, and with the recent release of the EOS R6 Mark III, Steve shared a video showcasing the capabilities of the camera, including the 6.9K edited file and RAW footage, which open a window to see both, the capabilities of the camera, and how the footage was graded.

All of the RAW clips used Canon Cinema Gamut color space and Canon Log 2 as gamma, while the edited file used Rec.709, so I created a project in DaVinci Resolve using DaVinci YRGB as Color science and Rec.709-A for the timeline and output color space, I imported the footage, applied the CinemaGamut_CanonLog2-to-BT709_WideDR_65_FF_Ver.2.0.cube technical LUT and tried to match the waveform of the RAW clips to the edited file, it was not a super scientific full effort endeavor, I just wanted to understand how Steve achieve that clean image of his videos.

One of the things that surprised me was how crushed the blacks were, a good practice to remove noisy dark shadows, specially in the car scene:

The highlights were dropped around 1 ½ stops, around ⅓ of the waveform is missing after the grading, and even though the black were crushed, it didn’t reach the full black:

There is also a slight shift of the white balance to a warm color:

After seeing how the RAW footage was exposed, I wonder which exposure technique does Steve uses? From waveforms, zebras to false color, because it appears to be perfectly exposed to the middle instead of the typical exposure to the right that some use while exposing for C-Log 2.

So, after experimenting, I created some LUTs that try to imitate Steve Chan video look for anyone to try, you can download them here, it is not a perfect match but a start point.

While Steve style is quite cinematic in the current times, style is something personal and subjective, so again, as an exercise, I graded the RAW footage as I like it, a little bit more natural:

I’m truly grateful with Steve Chan for sharing his footage which made this post possible, so go and subscribe to his channel DSI Pictures.