If you have the DJI Osmo Pocket 4P and you’re looking for an easy way to color grade the footage you’ve captured with it, so you can create cinematic, beautiful looking footage, let me show you how you can achieve that. You’ve seen me do many of these videos, so you probably know most of my settings. Today, I’ll actually focus a little bit more on the editing side of things, but let’s quickly go through the main settings I use on the Pocket 4P first.

The Most Important Setting To Change First

I always start by setting my bit rate to high. This is the most important, crucial part if you want to get high quality footage out of this camera. From there, everything I shoot lives in two custom modes: one for D-Log and one for D-Log 2. That’s pretty much everything I use on the Pocket 4P.

My Two Custom Modes

In my custom mode one, I have my exposure set to manual, my ISO set to 400, and my shutter speed at 1/60th of a second. That’s because I’m shooting in 4K at 30 frames per second, and shutter speed is always double the frame rate — you guys are familiar with that.

White balance I usually set to auto. I know this might trigger some people, but it really depends on how much I’m moving around different areas and how long I stay at one location. If I stay for longer than five minutes, obviously I will lock my white balance, because I don’t want it to fluctuate between different values. But if I’m running and gunning and switching locations all the time, then I prefer to set it to auto, because every location has different lighting, and I prefer to let the camera do its thing.

Next is color. I have D-Log 2 selected with color recovery on, which helps me see what’s actually going on on the screen. For image adjustment, I go minus two for sharpness and minus two for noise reduction. Those are extremely handy, because they give you a little bit more flexibility in post. I don’t want the camera to decide for me — I want to add noise reduction or sharpness myself.

My second custom mode is pretty much exactly the same thing: manual exposure, ISO 400, 1/60th shutter speed, but with the D-Log color profile with color recovery on and the same image adjustment values.

Why You Need ND Filters

If I’m shooting outside with those manually selected values, I will have a very bright and overexposed image. To counter that, you need filters. I’m using the ND filters from Freewell, and they are working wonders for the Pocket 4P. They don’t have any tint, any color shift, or any problems with sharpness. They work great.

The Best Grades Start With The Best Footage

The rest of the magic happens on the computer when we color grade. When we talk about color grading, we usually focus on what happens inside the editing software — adjusting exposure, fixing colors, adding contrast, creating a cinematic look. But the truth is, the best grades start with the best footage. If your footage is underexposed or noisy because you didn’t have enough light, there’s only so much you can recover in post. That’s why small lighting accessories like the Zeniko ZN light can make such a big difference for creators.

It’s a really interesting accessory for DJI users because it combines two things into one compact device: a fill light and a power solution for the Osmo Nano. The built-in 1,270 mAh battery can provide up to two additional full charges for the Osmo Nano, and it even supports charging while recording. It features dual lighting modes, including LEDs for more natural color reproduction and a high brightness COB LED for stronger illumination when you need more reach, and with adjustable color temperature, you can match the light to your environment instead of fighting against it. Whether you’re using the Osmo Nano or DJI Action cameras like the Action 3, Action 4, Action 5 Pro, or Action 6, it’s designed to add flexibility without turning your small camera into a bulky rig — and with its price tag, it’s a no-brainer for creators.

D-Log Workflow #1: Ready-Made LUTs And Conversion LUTs

There are a couple of different ways of color grading Pocket 4P footage that has been shot in D-Log or D-Log 2, and I’ll show you all of them. The first is to drop a ready-to-use LUT, which is usually just a one-click LUT that you drop on top of your footage. Then you simply tweak the exposure and the white balance if needed, and you’re good to go. Those are the SupraGrade LUTs that I sell on my store — they are optimized for efficiency and speed.

If you want to dive a little bit deeper and have more control, you need to color grade manually. In DaVinci Resolve, there are two ways to grade a D-Log shot manually. The first is to just drop a conversion LUT — D-Log to Rec.709 — on your clip. That gives you a nice starting point for your grade. Many people will leave it as it is. Personally, I would never leave it as it is, but to each their own.

D-Log Workflow #2: The Color Space Transform Sandwich

The second way is to use a color space transform. This is a little bit of a sandwich that you make between the conversion of your flat color profile shot and your Rec.709 shot, using two different CST nodes — CST stands for color space transform.

For the CST in, I set the input to DJI D-Gamut and DJI D-Log, with the output going to DaVinci Wide Gamut and DaVinci Intermediate. The CST out is pretty much the reverse: DaVinci Wide Gamut and DaVinci Intermediate in, Rec.709 and Rec.709-A out. Some people set the gamma to 2.4, but if you’re running a Mac, you can use Rec.709-A, and that actually works a little bit better. Right away, it already looks great.

Between those two CST nodes is where all the work happens. I build out a string of nodes: exposure, white balance, color balance, contrast, HSV saturation, a LUT node, and then some effects like glow, grain, and sharpness. Those are all the nodes I use to color grade my footage.

Starting with exposure, I quickly balance the image by dragging the shadows down a little bit while checking my scopes. For white balance, I wanted to make this shot a little bit more dreamy and summery, so I introduced a little bit of yellow into the highlights — you can already see the difference it makes going from colder tones to a warmer feel.

The color balance I do in the curves. I change the hue of the blues to something a little bit more teal, and I change the hue of the yellows to something a little bit more orange. If you look at the leaves, for example, they were a little bit greener, and I like them just a tiny bit more orange. Those are very minor, quick corrections — we don’t want to go overboard, because that’s not a good look. Just a tiny bit is what looks fine in my opinion.

I always like to increase the contrast just a tiny bit — 1.05 is fine. Then the HSV saturation is a great way to saturate your image without making it look bad. If you just turn up the regular saturation, it looks horrible. Instead, change the node’s color space to HSV, go to channels, and disable channel one and channel three so you only have channel two. Then, if you increase the gain on the highlights, it actually saturates the image. A little bit goes a long way — it adds a very nice touch of saturation into the right areas without going overboard.

On this shot I skipped the LUT, because we already had a very nice looking image. But to make it a little bit more dreamy and summery, I added a bit of glow. You can adjust the threshold, which controls how much glow you want, and then play with the gain and the gamma — those little sliders are your friends. I just wanted a tiny bit of glow on the street, where we have a little puddle to emphasize. Film grain is something that I love adding on top of my footage to get that film look, and then I always add a little bit of sharpness — 0.48 is what I’m always going for.

Looking at the before and after, it makes a drastic difference, I would say. And once the grade is built, you can just copy all of it and paste it on top of other D-Log footage. I did exactly that with a 60 frames per second clip of waves, and the only fix it needed was a little bit of green tint in the white balance node to remove a slight magenta cast around the rocks. In a matter of seconds, we had a great looking shot.

The D-Log 2 Workflow Is Different

The final thing is D-Log 2 footage, which unfortunately does not work the same way, because DaVinci Resolve does not have this CST available for DJI D-Log 2 — it’s only for D-Log. So for D-Log 2, we need another way to grade our footage properly.

What we do instead is make all of our main corrections first, and then add a final node at the end where we apply a conversion LUT — either D-Log 2 to Rec.709 or D-Log 2 to Vivid to Rec.709. I actually believe the D-Log 2 to Vivid version works better, so that’s what I applied. And by the way, this is a free LUT that DJI offers on their website.

From there, it’s all about corrections. The grain I had copied over was way too much for this shot — zoomed in, it was just a lot, and removing it revealed such a clean image, so I deleted that node. I dialed in the exposure, kept the contrast and the HSV saturation — even increasing it a little bit — and kept the glow and sharpness. I also really liked the bluer tones in this shot, so I left the white balance alone.

Then I added one more node with a little bit of a mask. Using a gradient, dragged out so it’s nice and smooth, I added a purple tint to the sky to make it look like a really nice sunset. You have to play with the color and the saturation, because it’s easy to make it too much. If the look ends up too strong, you can simply adjust the key output of that node to something like 0.5, which essentially lowers the opacity of everything you did in it, so it’s a little bit more subtle.

As long as you have the time to adjust these things and play a little bit, you can do wonders with the footage from the Pocket 4P, because it’s that good. It looks crazy good from the before and after. And if you’re not a fan of this stylized look, you can just remove it and still end up with a shot that looks super nice — although in my opinion, it’s a little bit bland without it.

This is how you can easily adjust the look of your DJI Osmo Pocket 4P footage, whether it’s recorded in D-Log or D-Log 2. We have a couple of different variants on how to grade it, and I hope this helped you understand the basics and how easy it is to create a great looking shot with this camera.

This article is based on a video from our YouTube partner Mihail at Mihail Svilenov. You can find more of Mihail’s coverage on his DroneXL author page.