How To Use Runway’s Text-to-Color Grade AI to Create Your Own LUTs
A look into how you might want to consider using AI for your color grading process.
How to use Text to Color Grade
As we’ve seen over the past few months, love it or hate it—artificial intelligence is here to stay. Now, while that may be true for certain AI text-to-image and chatbot tools and features, the jury is still out as to what other areas AI could truly revolutionize.
For film and video specifically, AI has found its way into different parts of the production process, most notably in pre-production and post-production. Yet, while many might be aware, AI is also starting to creep into color correction and grading — and the results are better than you might think.
Let’s take a look at Runway ML and its text tocolor grade tool and explore how you can use it to create your own LUTs inspired by either some of your favorite films or by your own personal or AI creations.Runway Text-to-Color Grade
While Runway’s text-to-color grade tool might not be considered a new feature in AI since it was announced almost a year ago (and frankly, in the fast-paced world of AI, it’s basically ancient history at this point), it’s still one of the lesser-known and lesser-used tools in Runway ML’s AI catalog.
However, with Runway getting better at AI video rendering with every update, plus adding a fully-capable mobile app as well, this text-to-color grade tool is becoming more capable of actually helping out video creators with their color grading needs.
How to Use Text-to-Color Grade in Runway
The feature itself is also quite easy to use and play around with, however—as we’ll explore below—there obviously are outside steps you’ll need to take to implement these color grades into your full video editing post-production process.
To get started all you have to do is get set up with the Runway app and dive into the text-to-color grade tool itself. From there you can upload your image or video and give a prompt to color grade your footage any way you’d like to see it.
From there though, the real trick is to find the best way to provide text prompts that the AI can understand to give you your desired results. In the Runway video, they recommend using full, rich sentences in a natural voice.
If you’re looking to copy (or be inspired by) a specific movie or TV show look, you can also just type in the name of your source material (Blade Runner 2049, for example), and the AI will attempt to recreate that cinematic look for you.
Use AI to Create Your Own LUTs
To take things a step further, as you can see in this video tutorial above from Eric Bo | travel9to5, the real innovations from this have to do with using this AI tech as a way to “steal” a color grade from your favorite movie and bring it into your own films or videos.
You can also of course do this with any color grade you come up with using the AI whether it’s a rip-off of a movie or not. It’s also quite easy as Runway includes a feature for processing these grades and allowing you to download them as a .cube file which you can then import into your video editing (or color grading) software of choice.
In the tutorial above, we see how to open up your Runway color grade in Premiere Pro by using the Lumetri Color panel. What’s nice about this is that you can then still go in and mess with the color more and as you see fit in case it wasn’t exactly what you were looking for.
To be honest, the results from these videos are probably best described as mixed. Some of these grades look pretty true to their source material, while some leave a bit to be desired. However, as a fun exercise and as a glimpse into the future, getting familiar with this AI tech and even exploring how to use it in your own workflows is never a bad idea, and could ultimately end up being a true game changer.
