iPhone + Color Checker + DaVinci Resolve = ?

I took some video with my iPhone and brought it into DaVinci. The raw footage looked fairly good already but I wanted to see if I get things looking even more true-to-life. I used a shot of my ColorChecker Passport with the Color Match feature - but didn't get the results I had hoped for.

The image as a whole is too red. If becomes very obvious if you can compare the video and the subject side-by-side. In this case I'm looking at a pine table that appears orange in real life. In my raw video, it appears a little more yellow - but not bad. After color matching though it is leaning towards rose-gold.

I've tried various combinations of gamma, color space and color temp - trying to see if maybe I just wasn't using the right settings. Nothing gave me a look that appeared natural or accurate to my eyes. Typically, I stayed with combinations of sRGB and Rec.709 and a gamma of 6500k - though I did experiment with other settings.

• What color match settings should I be using with an iPhone?
• Generally speaking... what results should I expect from using the color match feature with a color checker? (Ultimately I want to achieve true-to-life colors - no enhancements)

Are you using calibrated screen?
Also using a phone camera might not be the best idea to get true to live colors, as iphone does a lot of deciding for you especially with default app.
I would suggest something like micro cinema camera or a pocket cinema camera, and then play around with raw files...


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

Someone has a question and the first answer is basically "Buy other equipment."

I was also searching for that topic before. Although I maybe cannot give you the answer you're hoping for, I can tell you maybe why some shots are looking accurate, while your test shot does not look ok. I read that the iPhone is using multiple Color Spaces like Rec.709 and DCI-P3 (which makes things looking more red btw.) and switches how it wants to give you the best result automatically.

You can read in depth here: displaymate.com/iPhoneX_ShootOut_1a.htm#Color_Management

Spend few bucks and get "filmic pro" app, that will help in the iPhone side to have a better control over the camera

Thanks, guys! What a great tip - to use a third party app to get back some control and consistency in my shots. This has definitely helped. The difference is massive.

Now - I'm still noticing some variations between shots. So I guess my only remaining question is: what should I expect from the color match feature? Assuming that I use the same phone, the same app, and the same app settings, and I take a new shot with my Color Checker each time the lighting changes (e.g. outside, inside, different room, different time of day), should I expect DaVinci resolve to give me equal coloring across all shots (same RGB values at equal chroma/saturation, same hue values at varying chroma/saturation)?

And then, don't expect too much from the use of the color matching.
Rather use a decent screen and trust your eyes.

I started using color checker some time ago and noticed that comparing how much time it took for each shot to setup the colorchecker patern in resolve, plus manualy corrected the results was way way way way longer then just dialing in by hand/eye.
Stopped using it that way. Only in some strange special colored ligting cases i found it handy to have resolve have a first go at it.
I still use it during shooting , but in resolve not as a configured match source but just as a visual reference.

One other thing that might help is to ensure the iphone is not in Auto White Balance mode as you might be trying to color match a moving target. If you have Filmic Pro then you can lock the white balance for the shot much like a normal camera. The iphone is a great camera but it does have its limits. Good luck!

I took some video with my iPhone and brought it into DaVinci. The raw footage looked fairly good already but I wanted to see if I get things looking even more true-to-life. I used a shot of my ColorChecker Passport with the Color Match feature - but didn't get the results I had hoped for.

The image as a whole is too red. If becomes very obvious if you can compare the video and the subject side-by-side. In this case I'm looking at a pine table that appears orange in real life. In my raw video, it appears a little more yellow - but not bad. After color matching though it is leaning towards rose-gold.

I've tried various combinations of gamma, color space and color temp - trying to see if maybe I just wasn't using the right settings. Nothing gave me a look that appeared natural or accurate to my eyes. Typically, I stayed with combinations of sRGB and Rec.709 and a gamma of 6500k - though I did experiment with other settings.

• What color match settings should I be using with an iPhone?
• Generally speaking... what results should I expect from using the color match feature with a color checker? (Ultimately I want to achieve true-to-life colors - no enhancements)

Have you considered the possibility that the color checker is fine, Resolve is fine, the matching is fine but that an iPhone is simply not a good device to shoot color accurate videos?

Have you considered the possibility that the color checker is fine, Resolve is fine, the matching is fine but that an iPhone is simply not a good device to shoot color accurate videos?

This is a very wise observation.

For something like an iPhone, I'd throw the charts away and just bang on the images and make them look reasonable. The o.p. should be warned that I believe the iPhone does not shoot at a consistent speed -- it's a variable speed H.264 format that bounces around, because it's a very cheap camera without a locked sync source (which is true for a lot of cameras like this).