“Look setting can be an integral part of preproduction building monitoring LUTs or in camera look files. Or it can happen after production has wrapped but prior to the main grade starting or combination of those approaches.” Robbie Carman, Colorist, CEO, DC Color
We’ve mentioned in the past how much we dislike LUTs and plug-ins that radically increase the contrast of our footage, particularly when it comes to HDR. Which is just one reason why we prefer RED’s Creative LUT pack or Phil Holland’s philmColor LUTs. The following is from an interview with Erik Messerschmidt talking about his workflow on The Killer (2023) and how the LUTs they used only altered hue.
“Beginning with Mindhunter, Messerschmidt has developed an on-set HDR workflow and evolved it on every single movie he has shot since in collaboration with post supervisor and Colorist Eric Weidt.”
“I have been a proponent of that idea, especially if you are going to finish in HDR. It’s a DIT-less workflow where we build the LUTs in advance. For The Killer we built three LUTs depending on location [Paris, DR and New Orleans/Chicago]. They don’t touch the gamma or contrast at all, but they do adjust color hue. Those LUTs were loaded into the REDs and the images given an HDR transform for on-set monitoring so when Eric does the initial grade, he fires up those LUTs as a baseline for us to start from. We monitored in HDR on-set with Sony 17-inch monitors and had HDR dailies – editorial had HDR as well – in DCI-P3 and Dolby PQ Gamma. The dailies are made essentially as a one light print. You apply the LUT and process the footage and there is no grading done at all. It’s very similar to film actually.”
Anyhow, it came as quite a shock to hear Cullen Kelly say during a talk at ResolveCon 2024 that exposure and contrast are two parameters that are not allowed in look development, since we’ve always found his LUTs to have excessive contrast.
“The easiest distinction that I [can] make between look development and color grading would be something like this. If we look at color grading, and let’s just say I’m doing all this here at the timeline level of my node graph for now, for reasons that’ll become clear in a minute, but let’s just say I’m under this look and now I want to begin my color grading process. […] Now, any of my friends who follow me on YouTube, or who’ve hung out with me for any period of time at all, know what I’m about to do next: it’s time for me to start grading. I’ve got color management, I’ve got a look in place for the very first two things that I’m going to do: I’m going to set my exposure and my contrast, right? So let’s do a new serial node here and I’m going to go to my HDR palette and I’m first just going to spin my wheel and say, ‘all right, where do I want my exposure to sit?’ Remember, exposure is a creative parameter: do I want to go down? do I want to go up? where do I want that to live? Next up, where do I want my contrast to live? Do I want to open up the low end in my primaries? Maybe drop my gamma down? Stretch my gain up? What do I want to do with my exposure and my contrast ratio? This is the very first thing, this is the most fundamental thing in color grading. I always talk about this as the source of truth, and this being a good chunk of the definition of what is ultimately going to make your grade work or not work – it’s exposure and contrast. These two things that I just did, right off the bat, they’re not allowed in look development. You cannot do these two things if you’re observing good look development principles for a couple of reasons; but the biggest one is I just moved middle exposure, so for this shot, when I’m grading this shot, that works fine: I know what I want this shot to look like. At a system level, when I’m building a look, I don’t want to bias the exposure of all of my images up or down – I want those to flow through as exposed in camera, so that the colorist, whether that’s me, or someone else developing a look for someone else, so that the colorist is starting from a balanced position and they can elect to shut down exposure or open up exposure. That’s just one example of many of the way that look development and color grading are both highly interrelated and highly separate disciplines.” (italics added for emphasis)
The Daejeon Chronicles 
I would say that the LUTs he sells aren’t look development but are THE LOOK, hence the contrast. Also interesting is a vid on look dev by Cullen and a custom curve was used for contrast which is exactly what he says shouldn’t be done. (midtones/middle grey was pinned). So go figure. Personally I don’t like the LUTs and while I like a bunch of what Cullen does/says he can tend to say pretty much nothing with a whole lot of words.