When the stills go to a retoucher and the film goes to a colourist with no shared stills, the campaign splits in public. Feeds, sites, and OOH start arguing.
We pull stills from the same colour-managed timeline, or we send the retoucher a show LUT and a set of control frames. Skin, product whites, and black level are decided once.
Platforms compress both stills and video. A common grade is what survives that compression as one brand. A ‘prettier’ still that ignores the LUT is a different product.
HDR delivery does not excuse a rogue SDR still. We check both, on the same display, with the same stills open beside the timeline.
Agencies that traffic six months of cutdowns thank us when the stills folder is not a forensic project. That is the point of grading together.
Pacificfu produces commercial photography and motion from Vigo. The still and the film share a recce so a campaign does not split in public between a lookbook that looks like noon and a cut that looks like sunset. The rooms on Rúa do Príncipe hold tabletop, a compact cyclorama, and a colour desk. Clients sit with tethered stills and a calibrated monitor in one visit. Product and grade are not two cities apart. Location days stay on the granite we recce first. Bounce and a quiet key match the overcast; we do not gel a false Atlantic. If the weather turns, we wait or we rewrite the shot, we do not invent the hour in the suite. Agencies come with a media plan. We name masters for print, 1:1 and 9:16, keep a working project for the revision window, and hand an archive another team can open a year later without a private naming scheme.