Color Grading Non-Log Footage

Hi everyone, very noob question but I recently bought a Canon R10. One of the reasons was because it had 10 bit color but I made the silly decision to not check that it had c-log before purchasing it. I know it's on the R7 so may need to change body but has anyone got experience with grading standard, non-log footage? I'm shooting a documentary so would be nice to have some control over that final look. Will I have at least some options or am I kinda screwed?

Thanks!

You should still be able to adjust the contrast and overall exposure, you will just have less latitude, so you will have to make sure you don't blow the highlights when shooting.  So, adjustments, yes, and be glad you have 10 bit.

Experiment with it a bit now in bright sunlight, high contrast scenes, and indoor with some window light to get a feel for how much you may have to push the highlights to maintain sufficient shadow detail.

This is from an amateur who learned what little I know using Canon camcorders with minimal manual controls, very limited dynamic range, and certainly no log footage option.  (I am no expert, but I get by.)

Andrew S10 wrote:

Does it have HDR PQ or HLG?

See if you can load a flat picture profile onto it to squeeze a little more dynamic range out.

If you're shooting outdoors, and have time to set up a shot, you can use circular polarizer filters, Graduated ND or Attenuator/Blender ND filters to keep the sky from blowing out.

In the context of an outdoor interview, you could use a Scrim Jim with various attenuations of diffusion to soften the light on your subject, but this reduces their luminance in relation to the background, so your background is effectively brightened, but you can set up an ND net backdrop to bring down the background luminance, provided you're shooting at a very shallow depth of field.

If you do a good job while shooting, I don't think there's a reason to do much grading, just a little highlight recovery, selective saturation, contrast, and sharpening.

With 10-bit, even a less "appropriate" transfer function will still probably let you linearize and do significant adjustments - IF you can recover the transfer function using something like https://docs.opencv.org/3.4/d2/df0/tutorial_py_hdr.html - see the Camera Response Function section.

Also of great importance is whether or not a wider gamut than Rec709 can be selected.

You can still do color correction and color grading. The only difference is that you are a bit limited. If you drag RGB values around you will introduce artifacts a bit faster.

N-Log and RAW are not magical solutions for bad practice. You still need to set correct white balance, exposure and correct color balance.