Baselight bypasses lift, gamma, and gain

[Tom Evans]

Baselight 5.0 will be equipped with a new control set that they think is a more natural and instinctual approach than lift, gamma, and gain. What do you think about that? I'm dying to try it but I think it will be hard to let go of the old basic primary controls. In their announcement they state that the new control set mimics the way the eye ‘appreciates’ colour, so this is going to be interesting. 

[Andy Minuth]

BaseGrade will not replace VideoGrade in Baselight, it will be an additional tool. I think it is the right way to go, because Lift, Gamma, Gain was developed for telecine workflows, so basically to apply the grade in a video space.

Lift, Gamma, Gain was built with a SDR video signal in mind. The reference points for a telecine colorist are black and white. A simplified approach is to take the darkest point of the image and make it 0% and the brightest spot 100%. And with the gamma, you adjust the curve between these two points. One of the problems here is that specular highlights are ignored, because originally they were just clipped. Today the colorist has to take care of them manually with special techniques. 

For DI this is not the best way to work, thats why FilmGrade or other Log-grading tools were introduced. They are more practical, when a print emulation LUT or another display rendering transform is applied after the grade. In DI film is the foundation. It is extremely difficult to measure maximum black and white with film, because the transfer curves are very flat and non-linear in these regions. That is why the 18% grey patch, roughly in the middle of the curve is the anchor point. You do not think about, if something is 100% black or white, but more about the general brightness and contrast of the image. This is already a more natural approach to grading - in my opinion. 

And now with HDR deliveries, I think it is a very good idea to introduce new tools, that were designed to work natively in HDR. BaseGrade will not be based on a specific video signal or film, but on the human eye. To me this sounds logical, because in the future we will be less and less restricted by technology. Our perception will become the limit for the grading.

For example BaseGrade will not offer just one control for highlights, but several highlight regions, which is probably necessary to effectively sculpt a HDR output. 

I am very excited to do a test drive with BaseGrade and to see, how it shapes images.

[Tom Evans]

The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know! 
Thank you for your detailed and clear explanation, and thank you Filmlight for pushing the boundaries.

[Daniele Siragusano]

I was involved in Developing BaseGrade but I must say that Andi just nailed it… :-)

 

[Bruno Mansi]

On 28/08/2016 at 9:27 PM, Andy Minuth said:

For example BaseGrade will not offer just one control for highlights, but several highlight regions, which is probably necessary to effectively sculpt a HDR output. 

 

I saw a demo of Baselight 5 at the Filmlight's offices in London about a month ago. I can confirm that the BaseGrade's way of splitting the picture up into zones seems very flexible, not only for HDR but also for regular SDR images.

 

[Andy Minuth]

FYI: I wrote an article about that topic here on Lowepost. 

[dermot.shane]

awesome article Andy!

i've been using L*a*b in Resolve for a while now, and more recently  in BLE -  both myself and my cleints and find the resualts to bring us close to our happy place quickly

a questions for you if you have the time;

where are the diffrences between using R-Lab and Basegrade?

mainly the 4 zones and interactive surface mapping?

or are the maths substaintily diffrent under the hood?

next - a question about the article it's self, when you talked about Filmgrade + exposure you mentioned exposure not being truly linear due to input log curves, when in AP1 with raw sources is exposure also non-linear?

[Daniele Siragusano]

BaseGrade does not operate in Rlab, but constructs an optimised Achromatic Signal + two Colour Components.

[Andy Minuth]

It's difficult to point out the differences between RLab and Base Grade, because these are two completely different things. RLab is a colour space in Baselight, which You can use for special processing. And Base Grade is a colour grading operator. 

About Exposure: It depends on the working colour space, the source colour space is irrelevant in that case. I am not a colour scientist but AFAIK: For ACEScc it should work linear, but for the other usual log transfer functions like Cineon, LogC, S-LogX, etc. it will not.

[Emily Haine]

Any updates on if BaseGrade will be implementet in future versions of DaVinci Resolve or if this is a patented feature that we can assume will stay a Filmlight tool only?