Review: CinemaColour For Blender

Recently I was offered a change to look at CinemaColour For Blender by FishCake.

CinemaColour offers a large collection of professional color management looks (LUTs) to use with Blender's built-in Filmic color management. Check out the artist's website for some great examples. It comes in the form of an add-on that installs over a hundred looks and also offers a convenient way to browse and select the looks that are available. In this short article I'll have a good look at my experiences with the add-on and the looks it offers.

Filmic color management

Since well over a year Blender has incorporated Roy Sobotka's Filmic color management solution and everybody, really everybody, has been very enthusiastic about it ever since. This enthusiasm is well deserved because when using Filmic your renders may almost immediately gain a lot of realism, mainly by mapping the wide range of light intensities in your scene to the limited range of intensities your monitor can handle in a much better way than before. No more blown out highlights or loss in details in the deep shadows!

Looks

Filmic uses lookup tables (LUTs) to convert these intensities and by selecting different look up tables you can create different looks: not only can you choose these looks to present you with more or less contrast in your renders but because these lookups are done independently for all color channels you can use looks that add a color tone to your render. These tones can greatly influence the feel of your scene and because this mapping is done after the result is rendered and composited, it is very easy to experiment with the overall look.

CinemaColour for Blender

Now creating professional looks and making them available for use in Blender is a real craft and that is where CinemaColour comes in. The add-on installs over a hundred different looks and panel in the Scene options where you can easily browse through the list of choices and apply them to your scene. The available looks are grouped in several collections and each look has a name that hints at major blockbuster films that feature a similar look. The available looks range from subtle contrasts to moody color settings and everything in between. Some examples are shown below:

Look: CS ST Y L 3

Look: B2 Gangster

Look: B2 Sniper Alt

Look: B2 The Phantom Alt

Look: B2 Wade Pool

Look: CC Crush

Look: CM Ice

Note that we did not have to render our scene again to generate these looks, so generating these examples after render the scene a single time only took seconds.

Conclusion

A great set of professional looks done by someone who clearly knows their color management. The selection of the provided looks is also intuitive and every artist that is serious about the overall look and feel of their renders should check this out. CinemaColour is available on BlenderMarket.