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Nikon has announced that it's bringing nine "Imaging Recipe" color profiles inspired by popular color grading looks for its Red cinema cameras. The company says it'll let users get cinematic-looking videos straight out of camera. It's Nikon's latest announcement tied to its Red cinema brand, after it released the video-focused Nikon ZR earlier this year.
Four of them – CineBias, CineBias Offset, Film Bias Bleach Bypass and Achromic – will be familiar to Nikon users, as they've been available as Lookup Table files, or LUTs, for a while. While those are relatively subtle color modes, the newly-added ones push things a little further, which you can see below.
Unlike when Nikon released a few Red-inspired LUTs for its Z-series cameras last year, this release isn't coming in the form of standard Lookup Table files. Instead, Nikon is distributing them through its Imaging Cloud service, and they'll be applied to your H.264/H.265 videos as you record them. That means you'll only be able to use them on cameras that support Imaging Cloud, a list that includes the ZR, Zf, Z6III, Z5II and Z50II, though notably not the Z8 and Z9. That's a bit awkward, given how much effort Nikon has put into making those extremely capable video cameras.
Unlike with a standard LUT, you can't apply the looks to N-Log footage you've already shot; they have to be baked in at the time of shooting. That also means you're giving up the editing latitude you'd usually get with Log footage to gain the cinematic looks.
That likely speaks to the audience that Nikon is focusing on with these looks: not professional filmmakers trying to cut video from their Nikon mirrorless cameras together with footage from Red cinema cameras, but creators who want cinematic-looking footage without having to do a lot of editing work. That's almost certainly a bigger market, and those looking to use the Red Creative LUTs can do so with footage from the ZR, but it's still a bit disappointing that Nikon isn't taking a more open approach, especially given that Fujifilm just released a bunch of its own "Film Simulations" as more broadly compatible LUTs.
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