Today, we’re going to dive into the brand-new release of DaVinci Resolve 19. In particular, I’ll be focusing on one of Resolve’s coolest new features, the Film Look Creator plugin. This is Blackmagic Design’s first effort to include look development features inside of Resolve’s native toolset, and there’s a lot to talk about.
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My setup
Before we get started, I want to go over the working setup that I typically use. I’m color managing in nodes and I have my shots organized by camera into groups. In each of my groups, I have an input transform taking me from the camera metric out to my DaVinci Wide Gamut Intermediate grading space.
On the Timeline level, I have a macro technical transform that takes us from the DWG working space out to the display color space, which is Rec 709. The Timeline level is where we’re going to do today’s creative look work.
Starting out with Film Look Creator
The first step to using the Film Look Creator is to prepend a serial node. This prepending leads me to the first thing I want to point out about this new plugin: It works in scene space, in color-managed workflows. That’s huge! I would not want to use a look development plugin that doesn’t work this way. It’s great that the Film Look Creator plugin can slot right into our color-managed workflows.
Once the node is prepended, drop the Film Look Creator plugin onto it.
The first thing you’ll notice is that the Film Look Creator really affects the image. A bunch of stuff changes as soon as we drop the plugin onto our node.
This is my first small critique of the Film Look Creator: It doesn’t really start from neutral. When I’m doing look development, I want to be the author. I want to shape every aspect of the look I’m creating. That means I want to start with a neutral canvas and then introduce ingredients and feel my way through the coloring process.
That is really the heartbeat of look development. It’s about authorship and it’s about having greater control than we can get out of something like a LUT, where we can only decide to turn it off or scale it back. Resolve’s Film Look Creator gives us a lot of controls to play with, but it doesn’t let us start working from a neutral canvas.
Color Blend and the 3D LUT checkbox
Let’s take a look at all the sections in this plugin. The first thing I’m going to do is turn the 3D LUT Compatible checkbox on. This checkbox makes everything I do in the Film Look Creator compatible with outputting a 3D LUT, like if I need to create a viewing LUT to be loaded into a camera on set.
But this checkbox has another purpose. Turning it on confines us to only the operations that directly affect contrast and color rather than the texture of our image. Then, once we’re feeling confident and fluent in that area, we can easily turn that checkbox off and play with the additional options.
Above the 3D Lut Compatible checkbox, we have the Color Blend slider. This slider acts as a master fader for all of our Film Look Creator adjustments. You can use it to fade all the changes made in the menus below from zero to one.
Below that is Color Space Overrides. We’re going to keep that one zipped up for this article. That’s not something you’re typically going to need to interact with.
Film Looks
Film Looks were only recently added to Resolve 19, and Blackmagic hasn’t yet published the technicalities of them. To my understanding, these are simply different sets of color primaries that can be used to slightly alter a look before adjusting its specific parameters. These Core Looks are similar to the palette LUTs in my Voyager LUT pack.
I’m using the default look, Cinematic, for today’s article. You can click through the different looks below to see an example of what they do.
Akasaka 
Cinematic 
Elated 
Rochester 
Vintage Examples of the different Core Looks you can use in the Film Looks menu.
Three important Color Settings
Color Settings is the first of the two main color sections in the Film Look Creator. As you can see, there are a lot of sliders in this section and it’s easy to get overwhelmed. In my opinion, the only ones you should concentrate on are Contrast, Subtractive Sat, and maybe Richness. You should be able to get a nice-looking image with nothing but these adjustments.
I’m going to adjust the Color Setting sliders by eye until I get something that I like. While I’m doing this, I’m also bouncing around and checking the adjustments I make against the other clips in my timeline. Remember, looks aren’t only about one shot. They’re about lots of shots. You don’t want to fixate on just one shot because your look needs to work for every shot in your timeline.
Here’s what I arrived at. Contrast and Subtractive Sat are the main sliders I focused on.
Color Settings I wouldn’t touch
There are some Color Settings sliders I would only touch in very specific situations. Generally speaking, you’re not going to want a look to move your exposure up or down unless you’re explicitly doing an advanced type of push/pull workflow. If you’re not doing that, I encourage you to leave the Exposure slider alone.
The Highlights slider has a very narrow effect on the upper end of your curve, and it isn’t typically something you’re going to need to adjust at all. The same is true with Fade, which adjusts your black point. Sometimes it is nice to bring up your blacks just a little bit, but generally, Fade is less important than some of the other siders. I would rank it in the middle tier. You might use it sometimes, but generally, you’re going to leave it alone.
Like Exposure, I’m also going to encourage you to not touch White Balance, Tint, and Skin Bias. It’s not that they’re bad, but you only want to use them in very specific circumstances. These sliders can bias or break your image. They can create artifacts on a shot without you even realizing it. Remember, the worst thing that a look can do is seem great for twenty shots and then break on the twenty-first shot. That is something we want to avoid at all costs.
How to check your adjustments in 1D space
This leads to something else I want to point out about the Film Look Creator plugin. It’s just not that great about giving us feedback. However, we can use Resolve’s native toolset to check how smooth our contrast curve is in 1D space.
To do that, navigate over to the Edit page, go to Generators, and grab a Grey Scale. Then, pull the Grey Scale to the end of your timeline and right-click it to create a New Compound Clip. This is necessary so that the asset will show up back on the Color page.
After you hit Create, navigate back to the Color page. Now, we can see how our adjustments are affecting the contrast curve. By flipping our Scopes to Waveform, we can see the result of a Highlight or Fade adjustment, for example. Now we can play with any of our Color Settings and see how moving them around changes our Waveform.
With the Grey Scale compound clip, you can check how your adjustments are affecting your contrast curve.
How to check your adjustments in 3D space
But your White Balance, Tint, and Skin Bias may not only affect your 1D space. They might also have an impact on your 3D space. I use a program called Lattice to check my 3D space.
Here, Lattice is showing us the 3D graphs of two different Luts. One is “Mars”, from my Voyager LUT pack, and the other is my free 2383 printable emulation LUT. What we are seeing is a very mild versus a very strict restraint on what saturations are allowed through each look. These things may not be visually obvious in a particular image. If I don’t have saturations that exist outside of a constrained cube, I might not realize that my colors have been limited in that way.
You might be grading for a hundred shots before you realize there’s a problem. It might not be until you get to a shot of a bright neon sign that you realize, “Oh wow, that sign is being flattened out by the look I’ve created.” So, viewing your LUTs in 3D space is important for look development.
One big challenge
The fact that we can’t view things in 3D space directly inside of Resolve’s Film Look Creator plugin is challenging. It basically means that we need to be more conservative with the changes we’re making. Since we can’t see what’s happening inside the plugin, we need to err on the side of caution when we use our sliders so we don’t impose too much change on our 3D LUT cubes.
But there are also changes happening in this plugin that are not attached to sliders at all. In our Presets, things happen based on what we select from the dropdown menu, and we have no direct control over those changes at all. Since we don’t have that full 3D cube context, we can’t see if things are happening that are not immediately visually obvious.
This is perhaps the biggest “gotcha” about the Film Look Creator plugin in its current form. We need a bit more context if we’re going to be confident that all of our looks are going to work on every single shot in our timeline. We also want to make sure that our looks are going to work as viewing LUTs for all the different kinds of shooting conditions we might encounter.
Split Tone
Split Tone essentially pushes a cocktail of cool colors into the shadows and warm colors into the highlights, and that mixture creates color contrast and depth. It’s something that we typically see with film prints, so it has a strong visual association with cinematic, movie-like renderings. I think it’s super cool to see this implemented as a native tool in Davinci Resolve. To start, I’m going to Enable Split Tone, crank up the Amount, and set the Hue Angle to 23.
You can see on the vectorscope that Hue Angle moves my colors into a scheme where two complementary colors are playing off of each other. Setting Hue Angle to 23 gives us an orange/teal complementary scheme. If I rotate it further, it gives me more of a yellow/blue complementary scheme.
Use the slider to see how changing the Huge Angle alters the look.
Hue Angle
This image is starting to feel good, but my skin tones are getting a bit warm. I could readjust things and back off, or I could create a counterpoint by combining the Amount and Hue Angle sliders with the Pivot slider. And, by selecting our trusty Grey Scale compound clip, I can use the Waveform to see what I’m doing.
On the waveform, you can see that I have three lines that represent red, green, and blue. Red and green are the two lower lines on the left side of the waveform. At a certain point, everything crosses over to neutral, and then red and green jump up in the highlights and blue drops lower. That’s how I’m getting a blue push in the shadows and a warm push in the highlights. You can see it clearly when I rotate the Hue Angle. The greyscale gives us a very strong visual of the complementary axis we’re creating.
Pivot
When we move the Pivot slider, we’re moving where that crossover between cool shadows and warm highlights happens.
If we look at our image, we can see how we’re starting to bite into those areas that are already warmer. They’re starting to cool down because we’re changing the image’s Pivot point. This can be a great way to counteract or complement the changes we create with our Color Settings sliders.
This leads nicely into a theme that I want to hammer home: Look development is all about interaction. It’s about having a set of tools that allows you to do lots of different things. You need to develop a creative practice that lets you work in an interactive, holistic way so you can develop interesting looks that are going to hold up. You should be able to gently move things around and create a playground for your pixels to play in.
Textures
Now that we’ve looked at the color side of things, let’s move on to all the textural and spatial tools in the Film Look Creator plugin. The first one, Vignette, is pretty self-explanatory. We use it to knock down the edges of our frame in a fixed way.
I really like this new Halation tool. There was also a Halation tool in Resolve before Version 19, but this new one feels a lot better to me. We can even control the kind of blur and the effective hue of our halation with the Radius and Hue sliders. That gives us great control, and the visual result is way better than the previous plugin.
An example of how Halation functions.
Bloom brightens and softens the bright parts of your image. It can be really nice in the right settings.
An example of how Bloom functions.
Grain is also a big upgrade from the previous plugin in terms of how it feels on the image. Blackmagic spent a lot of time improving on the prior generation’s settings and I’m glad they did. Honestly, the textural settings might be where this plugin shines more so than the color settings.
Flicker, Gate Weave, and Film Gate
Flicker and Gate Weave model different sorts of film projection. Flicker mimics how a film projector bulb will sometimes fluctuate in brightness. Gate Weave models the registration of a film print as it moves through a projector. These are both bespoke tools that might not be right for every project, but they’re great to have handy.
Film Gate is perhaps the most extreme. It gives you all kinds of presets for different film gates, and you can customize them with Ratio and Padding. Film Gate isn’t going to be appropriate for most of your projects, probably, but it’s a fun tool to have.
Wrapping Up
Resolve’s new Film Look Creator plugin allows everyone to exercise their look development muscles without having to sift through a galaxy of DCTLs or third-party plugins. We can now scratch that look dev itch while beginning to create our own individual processes. In my experience, that is a fun journey to take. It doesn’t have a tidy, linear path, but it’s a great trip.
I am very happy to see this plugin inside of Resolve. I hope this article was a helpful primer on what I like in the Film Look Creator and what I think stands to be improved. Hopefully, you can now dive deeper into your existing look development journey and begin exploring the concepts of look development right inside of Resolve 19.
