Desaturate. Bias the mids a bit to the yellow side of things. Bring the blacks down a bit and try to stay away from raising the highlights. Use curves and be sure to do each adjustment in a new node. You've got a good amount of DR here to work with so it should be no trouble.

@rockfall what editor do you use?

Many thanks for the suggestions, I'll have a play around in Resolve and see what I can do. Look like i'll need to be isolating skin tones.

@RRRR I use Premiere.

Here is my quick test in Photoshop also. I changed the mode to 16-bit and started with levels flattening Red and Green channels. Then continued with color balance and HSL. Your image survived the grading, but just barely and started to fall apart in the end. Neutrally balanced image has quite lean colors encoded by AVCHD. For comparison I also attached a sample that was lens filtered, custom white balanced and exposed for highest gradability on location.

If you opened the ungraded version in Photoshop (shoes.jpg), changed the mode to 16-bit and then adjusted Hue slider, you should be able to turn the hues all the way around without the image falling apart. Now many kinds of clean grades and color combinations would be possible.

Hopefully this will provide some hints on trying to get that look you wanted.

I hardly tried to create final result, but used the opportunity to push some material a bit and especially tried the trickier bluish hues that rely on the weakest of the channels in these cameras. So all of the samples I provided are heavily exaggerated.

If you took the ungraded GH1 sample that I provided and tried to grade it like I described, you would notice that it will grade cleaner and with much more color saturation and you could turn the colors to your liking. In that case the custom white balance was leaning toward blue-yellow, but it would have been able to adjust it to lean on red-cyan, that would have given a different but equally clean saturated palette for different color. The palette in these cameras is limited, so one could optimize it on location for stronger saturation grades.

I think I could replicate the BBC look with that camera setup rather good. GH2 would probably do it without any trouble. The filter and custom white balance combinations resemble the missing custom picture profiles. 8-bit 4:2:0 palette could display a good image, but it will not grade perfectly. When filming it is possible to create a bias for the desired final colors and thus achieve cleaner and more saturated grade. The bias does not always have to be exaggerated but could be subtle aswell.

@aki_hartikainen

I have noticed you posting some stuff about shooting with filters to capture a weird looking image that at least has more information in it for grading. It is something I have given some time to considering because I have also noticed that the R,G,B,G histograms from GH2 Raws are quite unbalanced when viewed in Rawdigger.

I think LPowell also makes a point that your demo image does not look that nice even after grading so I can see that your ideas may have technical merit but for now lack a good working example.

Perhaps using filters is more relevant to RAW capture as the JPEG and AVCHD engines in the GH2 probably compensate for whatever specialisation exists in the GH2 for having a wide green, sensitive red, and a narrow blue response. I do look at the Raws and notice the pedestals and gain of the channels are very different so on that count I think you have some interesting ideas.

Bwhitz and Krotal get the job done but yall should post PNG instead of JPEG if you are going to put out grading challenges.

@RRRR yeah I've got AE but I'm only just learning the basics so I'm not very good at it yet.

@retrospective Thanks for that, very helpful, I like the skin tones. Can that sort of thing be done in premiere aswell or is it just an AE thing?

I'm going to take a look at magic bullet mojo aswell and see what the skin tone isolation is like.

@rockfall no problem, I am sure you can achieve the same thing in Premiere, I think it has most of those plugins available from AE!

There's one fundamental issue with your core image: it all falls into mostly one spectrum of light. Looks like you've got one daylight source, and one or two sources in the 5000K range.

The examples you showed have mixed color temps, or has skin isolated so that it remains the color of skin.

You'll have to actually key your image to get that look, and maybe mask. The quickest way to get where you want is to shoot for the look in camera: use a Kino for backlight and a tungsten source for fill, key, etc.

It is now very similar compared to the sample, but a little info on how it was achieved could be useful. Here is another of the binocular theme with a little less diffusion. Again just testing a bit in Photoshop using levels, curves and HSL still trying to avoid "post heavy" look. I could try to adjust the skin tones a bit like in the samples above.

I agree other than lighting could cost a lot in many ways on the sets, but adjusting hues later only costs time. It is a good idea to try to use available light as much as possible.

Then adding just a little bit of creative lighting should make a difference.

I used only levels this time. I changed the display for Hue, Saturation and Brightness, then compared those values from the actors faces. I did not try to make them as identical as possible.