Sorry for the dumb question, but what practical use could there be for this? I understand this is a great aid for understanding “what is going on” with the image when using different adjustment layers. You mentioned creating LUTs - can you shed some more light?
A LUT could be made of a gazillion layer blends, a curve, maybe a little sprinkle of Channel Mixer. Or maybe it was made in DaVinci Resolve or Nuke.
But in the end, everything can be recreated with one single curve.
You are kinda stuck with what you get when you are using a LUT, but if you can recreate the LUT, there is no limit.
This is how I do it.
I’m using AI42 004 from Evermotion as an example image.
Dubcat, you are sharing a great deal of really useful tips and interesting information, even though some of it is way too specialized or technically advanced for me to understand Thanks!
I did a fun experiment today.
There is a dirty technique for creating albedo textures from shitty diffuse textures. You duplicate the texture, invert it, change blend mode to “Soft Light” and boost the vibrance.
I have made a LUT that does all this for me, but I wanted to see if I could get the same result from one single curve adjustment, and guess what.
The curve is not perfect, so there are some differences. Like the LUT has some RGB splitting here and there. But I didn’t want to spend more time on it.
The curve is set to “Luminosity” blend mode, since I didn’t split the RGB values.
Like, who would have guessed that this curve = duplicate the texture, invert it, change blend mode to “Soft Light” and boost the vibrance.
well.. you might want to take a look into “3D LUT creator” by oleg sharonov.
It’s pretty powerfull tool, creating luts for use in PS or elswhere, which you could use directly in let’s say VFB+ so… pretty much all post done while rendering.
btw. why would you ruin your renders with instagram filters??
I just want to thank you for sharing this knowledge with the comunity. I was not aware of this info and i have not seen elsewhere something similar.
Interesting concept LUT.
I ran the trial earlier this year to test the Color Checker calibration part. Pretty powerful program.
The whole point of this thread is to
“decompile” existent LUT files, and make the modifications you want.
identify what a program does and recreate it
Then you can export it as a LUT again if you want to use it in VFB+.
I’m using ArionFX “Photographic” Preset (without the tone mapping part) as LUT in VFB+.
This is what “Photographic” does. I remade this curve and exported it as a LUT from Photoshop.
(I never save renders with LUTs enabled, only for preview)
I am going to be shameless and ask you if you would be willing to share that LUT from Arion ? Seems like what the parameter white (to raise overall midtones brightness) and small toe to keep blacks would do if full filmic mapping was exposed.
Also, why not saving with LUT ?
I am also pretty interested what “Local” tone-mapping looks like in Curve. Or Clarity/Punch/etc.. parameter.
Here you go, I have included my Unreal 4 version too
I know you, guthrie and warwick like to do as much as possible in frame-buffer, nothing wrong with that. But I get chills just by thinking about burning stuff into my images, guess I’m just too used to linear.
I actually did some tests yesterday, but tone-mapping is kinda tricky, we are talking about super whites and the curve is only 256. But here are the results.
These are with default “RandomControl camera” settings.
Clarity / Saturation / Vibrance etc is also tricky since the curve is black and white. I removed blue and green to make the curve red.
I used CameraRAW in Photoshop. When we go into the minus range, it starts to blur the pixels together.
If you got any specific stuff within certain programs, just give me a word and I’ll check it out. I love to find out how stuff work under the hood. PhotographicCurve.zip (370 KB)
Ah, expected the clarity to create perhaps even more smaller hills, but looks like this isn’t so easily creatable manually. Local contrast is very interesting feature, there should be more easily adjustable controls to it.
The tonemappers are suprising, I don’t really see much happening, expected something different :- ) Well interesting.
So what have we learned from all this ? If you want good looking contrast in your maps, just use ColorMap in Output.
This is the 100% Contrast curve from Photoshop. Add 3 points, one of them should always be 0.5,0.5.
all those contrast curves are pretty useless, but I’m quite shocked that ColorCorrect is not maintaining average gray. What you got here is a lift, not contrast.
Thanks!
Can do a quick test.
