Ultimate Film Grading Presets

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When Daz Studio renders an image, it calculates all values internally using floating point values and then converts that into the 256 levels of an RGB image typically rendered as a PNG or JPG image. The default conversion emphasizes light and dark areas to enhance the contrast in the final image, but other conversion curves may be preferred for your subject. This is where Ultimate Film Grading Presets comes in: it gives you a range of potential response curves and color filters to change the look of your final render, either to correct issues such as color balance or to be used creatively to enhance the mood of your images.

The Daz Default settings can give great results, but can also lose details in shadow areas, risk blowing out highlights, or make skin tones too high contrast. The Linear preset can be used to bring back details at the extremes of light and dark and makes skin tones smoother. Sometimes the Linear preset can leave the resultant image lacking in contrast and looking a little flat, so I have included two intermediate settings, called General and Natural, which provide a balanced image. There are no right or wrong settings; the joy of having so many presets is that they are quick to try with the Iray Preview to optimize your particular image. There are also presets for more or less contrast and more or less saturation, producing high-key or low-key images, and a host of Black and White settings too.

I have divided the settings between "Film Responses" which control the light and dark, and Color Filters which apply a color adjustment to either correct an unwanted color cast in your original render, or to be used creatively, and these can be applied at a number of different strengths. For example, an Orange filter can warm up an otherwise cool image and you can go from warm summer sun to cool moonlight with just a couple of clicks.

In addition to the more natural color correction, I have included more extreme color adjustments which are more for creative special effects. With all of these options for response curves and color filters, there are hundreds of resulting looks that you can apply to make your scenes look more natural or to enhance the mood of your images. All promo images are raw renders from Daz Studio.

Get Ultimate Film Grading Presets as an essential tool as part of your creative process.