Hello
So I have an animation project going on and I’ve done some color corrections in VFB.
Now, I want these color corrections to be transferred to photoshop/after effects.
First, I exported CCs as a LUT file.
After that I tried to apply the Lookup Table CC in VFB with that LUT I created, just to check if they are the same… and they are not.
The same is in PS (I apply it to 32 bit float EXR)
What’s the issue? Isn’t that supposed to be exactly the same?
This is Filmic Tonemap : https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/…CwVAobqMsk.png
This is LUT created from that Filmic CC : https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/…stpYvKpIs6.png
You can see that they are very different in highlights. And that’s a comparison straight from VFB. I did not change anything else.
Exactly the same result is in Photoshop 2023, looks exactly the same.
How I can crate that LUT to be exactly the same as the color correction of Filmic Tonemap?
Thanks
You need a .csp lut to be able to tonemap with lut in PS. No other lut format has access to hdr data in PS.
Example attached.
mP_Lin2UE3Filmic_468_5.35_32.zip (101 KB)
Filmic AMPAS for PS here:
Tonemapping with LUT in Photoshop / Affinity Photo - Chaos Forums
Hello Marcin,
Thanks for the information.
But I am applying that in the VFB. Exporting LUT from VFB and importing to VFB. And it’s different.
In the PS I am applying LUT with the same (different) result from Filmic Tonemapping.
VFB can export luts only for 0-1 colour range. It also can not process correctly any luts for colours above 1. Use Reinhard/CineonLog in VFB an do your corrections on top of that - then you can recreate this process in PS 1:1.
I can load LUTs made with the vfb in fusion that are applied to linear images with brightness values in the range of 0.0 to over 900.0 and they work fine, but I have never tried a LUT in PS.
Is this just a PS thing?
I see; interesting, and unfortunate. That explains why I often have to do further highlight compression.
Thanks. So VFB exports correct LUT which works in 32 bit mode, it’s just that some applications are not working with it correctly, right?
I tried that in After Effects and I had to waste a lot of time playing with color spaces to get close to what I see in the VFB and LUT exported…
Do you know correct workflow on how to export color correction settings from VFB to AfterEffects? Everything in 32 Float, I am exporting 32 bit Float EXR.
No. VFB does not export luts that cover above 1 range. It also does not process correctly luts that cover hdr.
There is no one correct workflow. Do you need something standardised or just something that works?
I use ocio and luts from Resolve. Color space / tonemapping with aces ocio and acescc luts to see color grading in VFB.
Your VFB adjustments should be tonemapping + color grading. And only color grading part (within ldr 0-1) can be exported via lut from VFB. Then just use tonemapping that you can easily replicate in comp:
any parametric filmic, reinhard, any log (you have cineon log in VFB as log), whatever works for you.
Hmm, but Joelaff says that
“I can load LUTs made with the vfb in fusion that are applied to linear images with brightness values in the range of 0.0 to over 900.0 and they work fine”
Or I misunderstood something?
I search for an easy way to transfer the corrections from VFB to AfterEffects. We did a series of stills which were processed in VFB and now we are creating animation for the same space, so I am searching for a way to make them to look exactly the same. Basically it’s just about copying Filmic Tonemapping to AE. Maybe there are a series of color corrections which I should apply in AE with the same settings taken from Filmic Tonemapping?
presentation by John Hable, original formula somewhere in there:
Hable John Uncharted2 Hdr Lighting (slideshare.net)
Filmic Tonemapping Operators – Filmic Worlds :
something like: …((x*(A*x+C*B)+D*E)/(x*(A*x+B)+D*F))-E/F…
or something simpler: UE3 filmic or my modified version:
Thanks, Marcin, very useful information!
I misspoke. In fusion the LUTs do not precisely match the VFB.
I am not sure precisely what is going on. I can indeed apply a LUT to a shot with 0-900.0 and get results in fusion, but those results are not precisely the same.
Normally, we just start tone mapping from scratch in fusion. But on some recent projects made use of the LUTs out of the VFB.
If I am understanding @piotrus3333 correctly it sounds like the only effect the VFB LUTs can have outside 0-1 would be gain based on the slope of the line between the last two points of the LUT (per channel?). So since we significantly rolled off the highlights we still got significant gain reduction in that 900.0 value, but linearly rather than a nice roll off.
That is exactly how it looks to me, linear above 1 if lut covers 0-1 range only. But Fusion supports “proper” cube format luts that cover as much range as you need, e.g. Linear to CineonLog can be done with cube lut with enough precision.
Fusion’s LUT support works fine, yeah. I guess the LUTs out of VFB are flawed.
Since you have done a lot of research on this, what do you think is the best “fix” that Chaos could apply? In an ideal world we could simply save a LUT out of the VFB and then apply it in Fusion (or any compositor) and the output would match.
FYI: Anyone using Fusion that wants to do Reinhard burn (Exposure->Highlight Burn) in Fusion you can use this Custom Tool node I made, which uses the same math as VRay (according to Vlado) ReinhardBurn2.zip Note the mask input triangle to the node is light grey rather than blue due to the way macros inputs work in Fusion.
ReinhardBurn2.zip (1.01 KB)
Fix from Chaos? I don’t think it is needed that much. VFB is hardly a colour grading tool. It should accept some basic luts and that is it. OCIO layer would be nice and useful as now you can only do one conversion on top of layer stack.
and the linear interpolation Fusion does on lut from VFB looks like that (it was S curve in VFB with curves layer saved as lut):
Not flawed just limited a bit. Also because of limited precision luts are not the best choice for tonemapping. Spliting hairs if you ask me but this is what professionals say.
I hear you that it’s not a color grading tool, but it is nice to be able to work with a particular look in the VFB and then get that same look as a starting point in a true compositing app.
Also, it seems like a lot more people than you or I might think do use the VFB for the final processing (or almost final). Not everyone has access to, or knowledge to use, a bunch of different software.
I think I would like the VFB to be to export a LUT that would reproduce the effects identical to the VFB in the likes of Fusion. I never used to think that much, but having used in more in a couple of recent projects it would be nice to use that as a starting point, rather than re-grading, simply because we end up showing samples out of the VFB to agency/client, and then if the re-grade is different sometimes we are chasing our tail to get it the same. Of course we could back to the old method of just always saving out EXR and loading it into comp, which works fine, but requires an extra step each time.
and the linear interpolation Fusion does on lut from VFB looks like that (it was S curve in VFB with curves layer saved as lut):
That is what I figured from what I saw… just gain past 1.0. Curious-- how did you generate that graph image? Is that actually from a LUT, or just an example of roughly what it does?