GRADE
ODBAT
BATSAIKHAN
COLORIST
FILMMAKER
EDUCATOR
// the real problem is almost always earlier.
I'm Odbat — filmmaker, colorist, and creator educator based in Ulaanbaatar. I work at the intersection of cinema, color science, and independent creator culture.
I didn't learn color grading from tutorials. I learned it by watching films I loved until I could feel why they looked the way they did.
Now I help indie creators across Mongolia and Asia develop that same eye — without years of expensive guesswork.
I build DCTL (DaVinci Color Transform Language) tools for colorists who want precision without bloated node trees. Every tool is built from a real grading problem I ran into myself.
Free for the community. More coming. Subscribe to the channel to get notified when each drops.
Open for filmmaking collaborations, color grading projects, and creative partnerships across Mongolia and Asia. No generic briefs. Come with a real project.
Multi-subject color grade across 5 talent. Scene-referred workflow, skin tone matching across different ethnicities and lighting conditions. This was one of the more technically demanding grades — each subject was shot in a different environment with different practicals. The challenge was making all five feel like they belong in the same film.
Warm-toned commercial grade. The brief called for a golden hour feel that still felt honest — not oversaturated, not filtered. Built the warmth through selective hue rotation in the highlights while keeping the skin tones anchored. The balance between "feels warm" and "looks graded" is about 2 degrees of hue rotation.
Cinematography and grade combined. Cool, desaturated shadows with retained warmth in the highlights. Talking head format graded for emotional clarity — the grade has to support the performance, not compete with it. Most of the work happens in the qualifiers.
Full documentary color grade. ZUD follows the aftermath of a Mongolian dzud — a severe winter disaster. The grade needed to communicate cold, scarcity, and space without becoming desaturated or flat. Kept the earth tones alive while pushing the blues into the shadows. The contrast is in the color temperature, not the lift/gain.
Custom DCTL bleach bypass look. The standard approach desaturates everything uniformly. This one desaturates luminance selectively — preserves the texture in the darks while washing out the highlights. Built entirely in DCTL. If you want the look file, subscribe to the channel.
High contrast commercial grade with punchy midtones. Finishing pass included HDR delivery and Rec.2020 output. The hardest part was keeping the neon practicals from clipping while the skin tones stayed believable. Handled with a highlight recovery node before the display transform.
Narrative short grade. The film relies entirely on available light and long lenses. The grade had to preserve the intimacy of the photography — any heavy-handedness would have broken the tone. Most nodes in this grade are doing less than you think.
Brand film grade. Clean, high-key with skin tones as the anchor point. Shot across 3 locations in variable conditions — the match grade was the main challenge. Consistent primaries across all three environments using a parade reference from the hero shot.
Most colorists handle skin protection with a qualifier + correction node on every shot. SKIN ANCHOR does it in a single DCTL with one slider — Hue Range. You define where skin lives on the vectorscope, it stays there regardless of what you do to the rest of the image. Built after grading a commercial where the talent moved between warm tungsten and cool LED sources mid-shot. The qualifier kept drifting. This does not drift.
Auto-balances lift/gamma/gain channels to match a reference parade reading. Feed it reference values for R, G, B across shadows, midtones, and highlights — it outputs the correction. No eyeballing neutrals on an uncontrolled monitor. Built after working on a project where I had to match 6 cameras in 2 hours with no calibrated reference monitor. This would have saved me 45 minutes.
Physically accurate bleach bypass simulation. The standard approach desaturates everything uniformly and crushes shadow detail. BLEACH BP desaturates luminance selectively — preserves the texture in the darks. Two controls: Strength and Shadow Protect. That's it. You do not need more than two controls for this.
Film halation blooms red/orange into highlight edges. Controllable radius, intensity, and color temperature of the bloom. No external plugins. No After Effects roundtrip. Pure DCTL math running inside the node tree where it belongs. Works best in scene linear before your display transform — that is the correct place to do this.
Ansel Adams zone system implemented as a DCTL interface. Divide the tonal range into 10 zones and adjust each independently. More surgical than a curve because each zone is isolated with minimal bleed into adjacent zones. Better for preserving highlight structure while lifting shadows than standard lift/gamma/gain. If you have been using curves for everything, try this once.