Color grading
Deliberately reshaping an image's colors after the shoot to set a mood, the thing that makes footage read as 'cinematic'.
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What it is
Grading is deciding what the colors mean after the shot exists: warming skin, cooling shadows, muting greens, lifting the blacks so they read as faded film rather than true black. It is separate from color correction, which comes first and is the boring, correct part (neutralize casts, match shots, get exposure consistent). Correction makes it right, grading makes it feel like something.
The working vocabulary is lift/gamma/gain (shadows, midtones, highlights) plus per-hue adjustments. Recognizable grades: teal and orange (warm skin against cyan shadows, the blockbuster default), bleach bypass (desaturated with crushed contrast, war films), the matte or faded look (lifted blacks, softened contrast, indie and lifestyle brands), and the green-tinted 'The Matrix' cast. A LUT is just a saved lookup table of one such transform, applied in one click.
Gotcha: a grade is a look, not a fix. Slamming a LUT onto footage with a bad white balance or blown highlights amplifies the problem, because grading has no detail to work with in clipped areas. And skin is the tripwire: push saturation or hue too far and faces go orange or sickly, which viewers spot instantly even when they cannot say why.
Ask AI for it
Apply a cinematic color grade to this image: push skin tones and highlights warm (amber/orange), pull shadows and background toward desaturated teal, lift the blacks slightly so the darkest areas sit at a soft charcoal rather than pure black, reduce overall saturation about 15 percent, and add gentle contrast in the midtones. Keep skin natural and unclipped: the grade should read as a film print, not an Instagram filter.