Note that (in the CC versions) you can apply Camera Raw as a filter to *any* image format--not just RAW. Ie, you can choose a key frame of your video in Vegas, export a still, import into Photoshop, then apply Camera Raw as a filter and access the plugin's toolset. So exporting even a limited set of CR's capabilities as a LUT to then use back in Vegas is very nice indeed!

My experience with "before and after" LUT generation is rather inconsistent. Worth testing, though.

Adobe camera raw as an export format is essentially just a lossless storage format achieved by retaining a copy of the original media within along with the Adobe edit commands to render or view it. You can achieve the same functionality in Vegas by just throwing the .veg edit file into a zip along with your original clip and calling it Vegas Video Raw. But as with Adobe Camera raw, you'd need the Vegas engine to do anything with it. Rendering to a lossless or low compression intermediate, while not deleting the original clip and edit files, is probably a more practical approach.

A lut can embody some of the functionality of a video edit but not all... if you limit your Vegas editing to the Color Grading panel, all transformations done there can be saved as a lut directly from the panel. A lut can also be exported from an fx chain by the Plug-In Chooser. But those luts will only contain particular fx possible to be expressed as a lut. Best to use the Color Grading panel to avoid having to figure out and remember which fx, like sharpen for instance, cannot be represented as a lut.

Before the Vegas Color Grading panel existed, I used to do much of my grading in Resolve, exporting a lut from there back to Vegas. Still do that sometimes for camera footage that needs functionality present there and absent in the Vegas and Adobe panels.

I *really* like the fact that Vegas allows you to export your plugin chain to LUT even if there is the possibility that some of your fx's won't translate out (ie, sharpening, etc). In practice it's easy to export a LUT, put an ungraded frameshot on a Vegas timeline, add that LUT, and see if it matches.

To me this is a *much* better design approach compared to forbidding the user from doing it to "protect" the user. I like when my tools allow me to use them as I see fit, rather than constrained by how designers think I should use them -- so huge kudos to the Vegas team on that choice.

With Camera Raw, I think people have a hard time understanding that it can be applied as a filter, because of its roots as a RAW conversion dialogue. CR today is one of Photoshop's most powerful tools. It is fantastically deep and algorithmically brilliant and in many ways a complete editing suite in and of itself

(sidebar: listing everything you can do with it would take a very, very long time. Check out, for example, what you can do with the graduated filter section. Try split-toning a landscape sky vs ground. Or try the dehaze slider, which actually creates quality data where it doesn't currently exist.)

Additionally, and importantly, Camera Raw allows you to do things very quickly and very easily, which if you use PS's traditional tools (esp layer based stuff) seems almost antithetical to the app's design ethos (for example: look up tutorials on how to correct skin tones in Photoshop. The level of complexity is like absurdist theater).

I don't know what is technologically possible with OFX plugins, but I'm guessing putting Camera Raw on a Vegas timeline as an Fx is a non-starter in multiple dimensions, not least of which the likelihood that Adobe doesn't much want people accessing its most powerful tools from within other company's products (heck: they don't even seem to like sharing features between PS and Premiere Pro).

So we have to turn to workarounds.

If you want the full power of Camera Raw within Vegas, you can export your video clip as a still image sequence, import that into Photoshop, convert it to a smart object (so filters apply to every frame), and then add CR as a filter. After editing, you would then export the image sequence out of PS and import the corrected sequence back into Vegas. (if you do this, watch for intertemporal issues, esp. using dehaze, as CR is optimized for still photography)

But that's really clunky if you just want to use one piece of Camera Raw for one specific task. For example, say I have a yellow backpack with a wide range of luma in a scene with lots of blues and greens and reds, and I just want to tweak the color, sat, and brightness of the backpack without degrading the rest of the image.

You can do that with Vegas! You can use the Color Corrector (Secondary) plugin, target the yellow pack, refine the mask, play with the hue and saturation and brightness, refine the mask again, tweak the colors some more, refine the mask again...

Or you could use Camera Raw's Color Mixer on a still grab and export a LUT using the technique and tools described above. I'm not going to tell you CR is universally better than Vegas' native tools in every instance, but I do like having the option of saying "let's see how Photoshop does here".

Aside from corporate strategy issues, PS and VP are such a natural pair for video editing. They so perfectly complement each other's weaknesses. I come at editing from a photography background. Initially video tools seemed strange and awkward to me, but over time, I came to appreciate the paradigm and the power, and began to want the same tools for photo editing. I bet people from video backgrounds similarly evolve toward an appreciation of photography's tools, and want to access them when useful for video editing.

Digital naturally drives this fusion of the two realms, and I believe the apps that can satisfy this evolution today will be the ones that thrive tomorrow.

Try it for yourself and see what you think. Sorry for the long speech! :)

Adobe camera raw as an export format is essentially just a lossless storage format achieved by retaining a copy of the original media within along with the Adobe edit commands to render or view it.

Howard I believe you are confusing Camera Raw, which is a toolset, with Adobe's DNG, which is a filetype that behaves as you've described.

I did some further reading,

https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop/what-colour-space-do-you-use-in-acr/td-p/10289683#:~:text=being%20viewed%20correctly.-,Your%20RAW%20files%20don't%20have%20a%20colour%20profile.,such%20a%20large%20color%20space.

Only a subset of what ACR can do will make it into the LUT. I do not believe anything that is adaptive in nature (affecting a portion of the tones based on image content) can possibly make it into a LUT, so shadows/highlights and clarity may not work as expected and controls like dehaze or sharpening, not at all.

I think ACR is nice for quick work with its streamlined front-end, and other companies have come up with similar approaches in the intervening 15 years better in some respects. I like ACR as it's familiar.

HSL was one of the weakest parts of ACR and color mixer seems to have finally given it more granular control for local hue changes. Before it was standard practice for photographers not to this in ACR/LR and to go into Photoshop where you can use a hue adjustment layer with masks as needed. I don't really see how the current implementation is better than Resolve or Graide Color Curves, just a different approach, but it seems quick to use. That time savings is lost though going between the two programs just to make such a change.

More tools are good so if there's a situation that justifies jumping between programs, go for it!

Reading further, camera RAW does not have an actual colorspace. So it seems that creating LUTS for it are more in the adaptive or creative realm than correction. But assigning a color space in Vegas might seem a logical place to start; testing that assumption, AdobeRGB seems a logical candidate.

Here's a LUT I created directly from the ICC profile to restore AdobeRGB to images in Vegas. See what you think.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/10-NUHm3NGds3oqVaqg2jCgMitbBtacxr/view?usp=sharing

I did some further reading,

https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop/what-colour-space-do-you-use-in-acr/td-p/10289683#:~:text=being%20viewed%20correctly.-,Your%20RAW%20files%20don't%20have%20a%20colour%20profile.,such%20a%20large%20color%20space.

Hopefully this will clarify (and be correct):

Photoshop is a color-managed application, which means you tell it what color space you want to work in (sRGB, Adobe RGB, ProPhoto, CMYK, REC 709, whatever), and then (1) if you open a jpeg with a different assigned color space profile, or a missing profile, Photoshop warns you and asks what you want to do or (2) if you open a jpeg with a matching color space profile, Photoshop uses your monitor's profile to correctly map the image's colors to your monitor so they display correctly.

A lot can and does go wrong with windows machines with regard to color management (including the almost bizarre reluctance of windows to allow you switch profiles easily and reliably), but for sake of argument let's say everything is working correctly.

If you open a jpeg and then apply Camera Raw as a filter, you're still in your working color space, so nothing has changed.

In contrast, if you open a RAW file (ie, Nikon NEF or Sony ARW), Camera Raw now sits as a separate process in front of Photoshop--a conversion process. You are now accessing the raw sensor data pulled from your camera's sensor (more or less), which has no color space assigned to it because it's just raw data.

Camera Raw does a basic interpolation to convert the RAW data into something that looks relatively linear (which includes deBayering), and then lets you adjust the image using the full latitude of the raw data as you see fit. Finally, you can choose what color space and bit depth you want to assign to the converted (RAW) image for importing into Photoshop.

I believe Vegas in contrast is not a color-managed app unless you enable ACES (and even then ??). So Vegas is operating in what Photoshop calls "Monitor Color" mode, which means (I think!) that Vegas just passes RGB data directly to windows, with no consideration as to how that RGB data was meant to be interpreted.

This is (I think) why using a broadcast monitor with Vegas is such a compelling option--you get to bypass all the windows color management mucking about, and instead use a reliable version of Photoshop's "monitor color" mode, where you have a known reference with (ideally) no tomfoolery happening from windows, or mismatched profiles, or elsewhere, regardless of what you put on your timeline.

I do not believe anything that is adaptive in nature (affecting a portion of the tones based on image content) can possibly make it into a LUT, so shadows/highlights and clarity may not work as expected and controls like dehaze or sharpening, not at all.

Sad but true!

HSL was one of the weakest parts of ACR and color mixer seems to have finally given it more granular control for local hue changes. Before it was standard practice for photographers not to this in ACR/LR and to go into Photoshop where you can use a hue adjustment layer with masks as needed. I don't really see how the current implementation is better than Resolve or Graide Color Curves, just a different approach, but it seems quick to use. That time savings is lost though going between the two programs just to make such a change.

More tools are good so if there's a situation that justifies jumping between programs, go for it!

I'm very impressed with what the color mixer does, and it is super-fast. In a perfect world I'd ask for both ACR's color mixer and Resolve's hue-v-hue, hue-v-sat, etc curves in Vegas. Graide isn't there for me in terms of algorithm quality yet (and also it appears you can no longer buy it, at least for now).

There are things ACR can do which are very hard to replicate, and importing/exporting image sequences is definitely the slowest way to use those tools for Vegas workflows, so hopefully at least some of you will find this interesting LUT workaround useful. After a short learning curve, it doesn't take much time at all to do it. I'll definitely be trying it for color mixer stuff where Vegas native tools fail.

In that sense, I think it's a worthy addition to the Vegas editors' toolkit. :)

I believe Vegas in contrast is not a color-managed app unless you enable ACES (and even then ??). So Vegas is operating in what Photoshop calls "Monitor Color" mode, which means (I think!) that Vegas just passes RGB data directly to windows, with no consideration as to how that RGB data was meant to be interpreted.

That is correct. Vegas works without respecting any ICC profiles, such as AdobeRGB. I previously repurposed some of Photoshop's color spaces as LUTS specifically to make up the deficit, and they work correctly, at least 98%.

This is simply a different application of such a LUT, to apply a known pleasing color space to RAW images in Vegas, as shown above. ACES doesn't support still image profiles other than the fallback sRGB.

Thank you for clarifying -- I figured you knew more about that than me!