Ethos Studio’s Sam Howells on the Intersection of AI and Color Grading

Sam Howells
Colourist at Ethos Studio

Truthfully, I have not found many consistent uses for AI tools in my work as of yet! I think interesting tools may start appearing in the next year or two, but right now, most of the commonly available tools are more broad-stroke image generation and less tailored to specific roles and niches within the industry. Software developers have been keen to advertise AI or machine learning capabilities in their latest updates as it is this year’s biggest tech buzzword, but so far I have found those tools do not have the reliability that is required for doing the job day in and day out. The interactivity and manual control of AI is its current bottleneck. In a job where things are constantly changing in such subtle ways, it’s imperative that all the tools we use give us the flexibility to manually tweak the results.

The most interesting AI-driven tool I’ve found so far is Color.io. It is a browser-based colour editor built on an engine of analogue imagery that allows each of the colour operators to make rather clean adjustments with a colour response similar to that of analogue film. It doesn’t integrate perfectly with Resolve, but it exports fairly robust LUTs that can offer a good starting point with the right conditions.

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