Most of the time; when creating a specific look in DVR using grade references supplied by your clients, you will aim to eye-match the reference exposure, contrast, saturation using your lift, gamma and gain controls then use curves and HSL to cherry pick hues, Luminance, Saturation and log for secondaries for more delicate work and either save your grade or export a LUT, which in turn can be applied across all the other shots once you have completed your first pass* (*balancing shots using your vectorscopes!) and with a few manual adjustments you are done.
When you have been doing this for a few years, it can be a quick and easy process but if you are just starting out or if you are looking for a fast colour workflow with accurate colour targets then there are actually quite a few applications and plugins available to help achieve good results in no time. 3D LUT Creator is one of them, the 3D LUT Creator application creates 3D LUTs that can be imported into various applications such as Adobe Photoshop, DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere Pro, FinalCut Pro, Adobe After Effects and it is now also available as an OFX plugin for Resolve. As an application, this is what 3D LUT Creator looks like...
As you can see in this video, when colour correcting with 3D LUT Creator you can bend the colour grid tied to the colour plane containing saturation and hue. The use of this interface allows you to completely change the colour scheme of the image or work with the desired colour ranges separately too.
Here is how the magic works...
Obviously, I am hardly touching the surface here on how much can be done with 3D LUT Creator and as you can see from the website’s endless list of tutorials not only you can pretty much do everything to do with colour transformation to create all sorts of cool Looks but it also allows you to “Colour match” using your reference image.
Check out the following tutorial; it demonstrates how the Colour Match tool is used. This tool allows you to copy the toning and colour scheme from one image to another for an accurate reference match (perfect when a job requires colour accuracy). Boom!
Again, you can achieve this using Colour targets too
If you decide to use the application on its own, there is a catch though; the application only allows you to use stills, and you cannot see the effect until you apply the LUT in your application of choice. So once you have created a LUT, just like with most LUTs being applied, you would still have to make a few small manual adjustments to your clip to make sure everything looks as it should in motion.
This wouldn’t probably help toward a fast grading workflow which is why the OFX plugin is the way to go, you can drop 3D LUT Creator on your node, like any other OFX plugin, apply the LUT you have just created (through Plug-in connected source) and control its settings inside DaVinci Resolve to give you more creative freedom and quick accurate results.
Love it!
