Two Free Color Correction Plug-ins from Red Giant Software
Friday, April 8, 2011 at 1:10PM Today Red Giant Software released two new Magic Bullet effects for Final Cut, Premiere, and After Effects, and they are 100% free for any kind of use.
First up is Colorista Free. Part of the goal of the original Colorista was to create a single, easy-to-use 3-way color corrector that would be consistent across multiple platforms. When we updated it to Colorista II, the goal expanded to packing as much color correction power as could possibly fit into one effect. Colorista II has been extremely popular, which warms my heart, because it means filmmakers everywhere are putting real care into their color correction work.
But I never lost sight of that original goal of creating a color corrector that everyone could use. I pointed out to the team that Rebel CC continues to be a popular download from Prolost. We joked internally that Colorista II was so powerful, we should just give the original Colorista away for free.
And then I stopped laughing.
Colorista Free isn’t exactly the original Colorista. It lacks a few features, most notably Power Masks. But by stripping it down to something simple, we enabled a feature that even Colorista II can’t boast: CDL compatibility.
CDL stands for Color Decision List. Like an EDL, but for color corrections, the CDL is a method of sharing simple, primary grades between different systems. It was created by the American Society of Cinematographers and is supported by nearly all high-end color grading systems.
Twirl open the CDL section of Colorista Free and you’ll see nine sliders called Slope, Offset, and Power. These, along with the Saturation control, are the ten values that the CDL uses to communicate a grade. You can edit them directly if you like, but you don’t have to—they are a mirror of the color wheels. If you have CDL values from another system, you can enter them manually, or create a scripted workflow that transfers values to and from these sliders.
The CDL is an emerging standard and the workflows surrounding it are not set in stone, so we’re releasing Colorista Free as “workflow ready,” in part to help encourage people to use the CDL, and maybe even share the scripts and tools they use to build a workflow around Colorista Free and other CDL-compliant tools.
If you want an easy way to ensure that CDL values stay attached to your shots, Colorista Free allows you to burn them in to the image. In this way you could do a rough color pass on an edit and send it along to an online color session. The colorist can use the values burned-in to the image as a starting point for their grading, even if they don’t have an automated CDL pipeline.
Or you can just ignore all that stuff and add a free color corrector to your arsenal, confident that you can share your projects with others without requiring them to buy any plug-ins.
Magic Bullet Colorista Free works with Adobe After Effects CS3, CS4 and CS5, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and Final Cut Pro 6 and 7.
LUT Buddy is also about sharing color corrections, but in a completely different way. Look Up Tables, or LUTs for short, are compact files capable of holding complex color adjustments. People use LUTs to share color grades, simulate display devices and film stocks, and correct gamma and color space issues. The problem is, they’re hard to make. LUT Buddy solves that handily by drawing an unfolded color cube on your image. You can then color correct it however you like. A second application of LUT Buddy reads the corrected colors from the cube and stores the adjustment as a LUT. You can then save that LUT in a variety of formats, or load it back in to LUT Buddy to apply the color correction. With LUT Buddy, a ten-layer-deep color correction can be compacted into one, tiny file that can be loaded into almost any high-end system, and even used for real-time previews on set.
Magic Bullet LUT Buddy works with Adobe After Effects CS3, CS4 and CS5, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, Final Cut Pro 6 and 7, and Motion 3 and 4.
Reader Comments (18)
Thanks! Free is always good. Just snagged mine.
Looks awesome. I wish you had a version for Avid, but I know AVX2 doesn't give you the option for the color wheels. Maybe you could do just the CDL. It would kind of look like the Primary room in a Resolve, right?
I've been going back to CS4 just to use the Rebel Tools and the original Colorista (can't afford the upgrade to II yet.) Now, in two weeks I've got DVR Tools and Colorista on CS5. You may be mad but, oh, in such a good way. Nice going. Thanks.
Awesome! Thanks Stu! Avid version of LUT Buddy, please?
Can send money.
Great Stu.
Any thought on workflow in combination with the Rebels tools?
Anders Kjaer
First of all, I've been waiting for something like LUT Buddy for a long time. Thank you :)!
When doing some tests, I realized that the LUTs you export clip at 1.0 even if you work in 32 bit float. I know AEs Apply Color LUT filter does the same. Is there a way around this when exporting LUTs for say Nuke for example?
This is awesome, Stu! Thanks so much! I've been drooling over Colorista for years now, but it hasn't been in the budget. Though, honestly, I've gotten a lot of mileage out of Color Finesse. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on buying your products vs. using the very powerful Color Finesse which comes free with After Effects.
WOW, thanks!!!
this is a big deal for people on tight budgets, like myself: my current color-correcting arsenal is just MB Mojo and MB Quick Looks, so Colorista Free will feel right at home and will be more than welcome!!
I must confess that I don't like Apple Color. I'm not sure why. So this is very exciting for me. I've been planning to save for the whole set including Colorista, so getting to work with something like its granddaddy will be fun!
This is incredibly useful for me in Final Cut Express which has no 3 way color corrector of its own. I have been needing something like this. Thanks!
It's not really an unfolded color cube, it's a sliced color cube.
We prefer to work with a different layout, using a long row for each color cube and stacking them up to store multiple LUT's, either for masked effects or animation or just versions.
It doesn't matter to the software, but from a human factor standpoint, I find a 1D layout to be much easier to view than a 2D or 3D one.
Hm, I am having a little bit of trouble with LUT Buddy. I exported an image from After Effects with a 3D 64 LUT, imported it into MBL stand-alone and did some color correction, then re-imported that color-corrected image into AE and created a LUT out of it. Now when I apply that LUT to the same image it is just ever so slightly different (it has more green in the shadows).
Any ideas on how I can fix this? I admit that I am pretty new to LUTs. I suspect it has something to do with the way I am exporting the LUT - I tried a bunch of variations on the settings but saw no difference.
- Spencer
Spencer, a LUT can only hold a global color adjustment. Magic Bullet Looks does much more that just color adjustments. Things like diffusion, vignettes, and flares will not only not be stored in a LUT, they'll screw up the LUT capture process.
I have to say that the CC tools Magic Bullet Looks and Colorista II are pretty much awesome. Had to get my workplace to buy them and get stuff like this done at my freetime:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yx8p7ZxEBUs
So thanks Stu for making all these great CC tools!
LUT buddy got A LOT more useful since Canon and Technicolor released their CineStyle picure style, with accompanying LUT table (I guess it's not a big surprise to you, as that accompanying LUT table says it was created with LUT buddy...)
still, you may want to modify Red Giant's FAQ on this product, though: unlike your blog post, right now the official site only refers to how that tool can SAVE your color correction to LUT tables so that other people can use them, and not even once does it say that it can import other people's tables too
there's surely lots of smarter people than me out there, but for a few hours this got me fooled into thinking that this wastn't the tool I was looking for
This post seems more current so I´ll repost:
Hey this could be a little obvious but amazing none the less, what if you came up with a control interface for colorista II on ipad and 3 of this cheap game controllers ???
Fling http://tenonedesign.com/fling.php
Unless somebody already did it and I´m not aware of.
why do you need to get an ipad there at all costs?
when it came out, and stu asked about the possibility of using it as a control surface, I proposed using a standard gamepad:
http://www.tweaknews.net/reviews/rumble/img/intro.jpg
using the two analog controllers:
* hit 1 to control shadows and midtones, 2 to control shadows and highlights, 3 to control midtones and highlights
* hit 5 to control brightness on whichever two wheels you've got selected currently; 6 for saturation
* hit "up" to increase the sensitivity of thes analog controllers, "down" to lower it
it must be a lot easier to program, cheap as can be, and, unlike a touchscreen, it has tactile feedback
no apple logos on the controller, though...
Why is FCP/LUT Buddy with Technicolor .mga file applied, so slow to render. The rendering time in FCP for a 50 minute movie I just did is 3-days! Is there not a faster way of rendering this? How about a Looks preset, rather like Simon Walkers wedding presets? I tried just an S curve in Looks and it did render quickly but of course I did not have the full set of adjustments.