Apple Log color correction: iPhone footage to clean Rec.709

The iPhone 15 Pro and newer Pro models record Apple Log, and it intercuts with real cameras surprisingly well, once it is corrected properly. It also fails in a specific way most tutorials skip: convert only the curve and your greens go wrong. Here is the whole picture.

Apple Log is two conversions, not one

Like every log format, Apple Log flattens a wide dynamic range into a gradable file, so straight out of the phone it looks low-contrast and washed out. The usual fix, a transfer conversion from log to Rec.709, is only half the job here.

Apple Log records in BT.2020 primaries, a substantially wider gamut than Rec.709. If your conversion handles the curve but not the gamut, the wide green primary never gets mapped down, and the result is that characteristic look: foliage too green, saturated scenes slightly radioactive, skin that will not settle. If your Apple Log "always looks a little green or oversaturated after the LUT," this is almost always why.

The correction order

1. Convert properly. Use a transform that does both legs: the Apple Log curve to display gamma AND BT.2020 to Rec.709 primaries. In Resolve, a Color Space Transform node set to the correct input (Apple Log / Rec.2020) does this; a bare technical LUT may or may not, so check what yours actually claims.

2. White balance on the scopes. Phones meter and white-balance aggressively, but mixed indoor light still leaves casts. Neutralize against a gray reference or the vectorscope, not your eyes.

3. Seat exposure gently. Apple Log has real highlight headroom; let bright scenes stay bright and roll the top end off instead of dragging the whole image down. Crushing an iPhone clip to protect a sky it already lost is the fastest way to make it look like a phone again.

4. Match to your A-cam, then look. Correct the iPhone toward your main camera's neutral baseline before any creative grade, so one look lands identically on both.

Where it fits in a real kit

Apple Log's sweet spot is the angle you could not otherwise justify: a locked-off ceremony wide, a car interior, a scouting day, the B-cam when the second shooter cancels. Corrected properly it holds up next to dedicated cameras far better than it has any right to; uncorrected it announces itself instantly.

Or let the boring half run itself

Everything above is measurement, not taste, which is why Basecut automates it: it detects Apple Log per clip, applies the full conversion (curve and BT.2020 gamut both), runs a closed-loop white balance and exposure pass, and hands per-clip grades to DaVinci Resolve, all locally on your machine. Your iPhone clips land in the same project, on the same baseline, as everything else you shot.

Culling and color are free on your own footage. See it on real footage.