RED IPP2 or Legacy colour science, and which LUT you need

Same R3D file, two ways to read it. Pick the older one by accident and every colour comes out about 40% weaker, while your greys look perfectly fine.

Shooting RED? PursuitLuts for RED is built for IPP2, the modern one.

The short version

A RED file is raw, so the camera doesn't decide its colours. Resolve does, when it decodes the clip. There are two ways to do that.

Legacy is the older way. You pick a pair of names per sensor, like REDgamma4 with DRAGONcolor2, or REDlogFilm with REDcolor4. Different camera, different pair.

IPP2 replaced all those pairs with one: REDWideGamutRGB for colour and Log3G10 for brightness. It's the same pair on every modern RED, which is why one LUT can serve the whole line.

Our files expect IPP2. That isn't a preference, it's what the files were built and measured against.

How to tell which one a clip is using

On the Color page, open the Camera Raw tab and look at Color Science. It says IPP2 or Legacy. If it says Legacy, the two menus below it will show a gamma and a colour space with older names.

Older footage often opens as Legacy because that's how the project was set up, not because the clip demands it. Switching it to IPP2 re-decodes the same raw file the modern way. Nothing is lost, and nothing about the recording changes.

If IPP2 isn't offered at all for a clip, that footage predates it, and our RED files aren't the right tool for it as they stand.

What the wrong one costs, measured

We took a standard colour chart, wrote its true colours into REDWideGamutRGB, then read those same numbers as if they were the older spaces. That's exactly what happens when a clip is decoded one way and treated as the other.

• Read as DRAGONcolor2: colour comes out about 40% weaker, hue turns about 3.4 degrees, average error 5.5.
• Read as REDcolor4: about 43% weaker, same 3.4 degrees, average error 5.9.
• Read as REDcolor3: about 38% weaker, average error 5.1.
• Whites and greys: unchanged in every case.

Those errors are measured in CIEDE2000, where about 1 is the smallest difference a person can see side by side. So this is not subtle on colour, and invisible on grey, which is why it's easy to miss until something saturated is in shot.

Why it looks flat rather than wrong

Weaker colour reads as "the LUT isn't doing much" rather than "the settings are wrong". The usual reaction is to add saturation, which pushes every colour up by the same amount when the error was different for each one. Fixing the decode is one menu and costs nothing.

Once Camera Raw says IPP2, REDWideGamutRGB and Log3G10, drop a PursuitLuts file on your last node and the conversion and the look are both handled.

What about Legacy footage you can't re-decode?

Email hello@pursuitlabs.ai with a frame. We'll tell you honestly whether a conversion is worth building for it, rather than selling you files that expect something your clip doesn't have.

Already on IPP2 and wondering about the other settings? That guide is here.

Updated 2026-10-06. All guides