Why Your Apple Log Footage Looks Grey and Flat (And How to Fix It)
You turned on Apple Log for the first time, shot something beautiful, opened it on your computer — and it looks like someone left a grey blanket over the whole thing. Washed out. Slightly green. Nothing like what you saw.
Nothing is broken. That’s exactly what’s supposed to happen.
Log is a container, not a look
A normal video file makes decisions for you. The camera picks the contrast, the saturation, the way highlights roll off, and bakes all of it in permanently. It looks good straight away — and you can’t undo any of it.
Log does the opposite. It records the widest possible range of brightness your sensor can capture and stores it in a deliberately flat, low-contrast signal. All the information about the bright sky and the dark shadows survives. The trade-off is that it looks terrible until you convert it.
Think of it as a RAW photo versus a JPEG. Nobody posts an unedited RAW file and complains it looks dull.
What “converting” actually means
Two separate things have to happen, and most free LUTs only do one of them badly.
One: the transfer function
Apple published the exact mathematical curve Apple Log uses to encode brightness. In Apple Log, 18% middle grey — the standard reference for average exposure — sits at about 48.8% of the signal. In Sony’s S-Log3 it sits at 41.1%. In ARRI’s LogC4, 27.8%.
Those are wildly different. A LUT built for one curve applied to another will crush your shadows or blow out your highlights, and no amount of fiddling afterwards fully recovers it.
Two: the colour gamut
Apple Log records a much wider range of colours than a normal Rec.709 display can show. Squeezing that down needs a proper mathematical mapping. Skip it and greens go radioactive, skin goes waxy, and blues turn purple.
Why most free LUTs make it worse
Search “free Apple Log LUT” and you’ll find dozens. The majority are a contrast-and-saturation curve someone built by eye, exported once, and renamed for every camera brand. They add punch. They don’t convert anything.
You can spot one immediately: it clips. Point your camera at a bright window, apply the LUT, and watch the highlights slam into pure white with no detail. A correct conversion rolls highlights off smoothly — brightness keeps increasing but never hits a wall.
The order that fixes it
Balance exposure first. A LUT is not exposure correction. If your shot is a stop under, fix that before the LUT, not after.
Apply the conversion LUT for the format you actually shot. Check the filename.
Turn off any other conversion. If your editor is already applying a camera LUT or colour management, stacking a second will crush the image. This is the most common mistake.
Then grade. Contrast, mood, style — all of that happens on top.
In DaVinci Resolve: correction on node 1, conversion LUT on node 2, creative grade on node 3.
Do this on your next shoot
Shoot the same scene twice — once in Log, once in the standard profile. Convert the Log version properly. Look at the sky in both. That’s the whole argument for Log in one comparison.
We built free, colour-accurate Log → Rec.709 conversion LUTs for 11 formats — Apple Log, S-Log3, D-Log, N-Log, V-Log, C-Log3, F-Log2, Blackmagic Film, RED and ARRI. Built from the published transfer functions with real gamut mapping. No cost, no watermark. Download them free at layrkit.com/free-pack
