There's a point in most colorists' learning curve where things stop working and they don't know why. The grades look muddy. The colors shift weird when you push them. The look that worked on one clip falls apart on another. A lot of the time, the problem isn't the grade. It's the pipeline. Specifically: whether you're working scene-referred or display-referred. Most people never make that distinction consciously. They just grade. And that's fine until it isn't. what scene-ref