Hello fellow Logik Forum users!
I’ve spent some time looking around at the default Matchbox Shaders and also the Logik Matchbox Shaders, and can’t seem to find a real solid Hue Curves tool. Before I waltz over to the feature request forum, does anyone know if there’s a good one out there that I’m missing? I’m specifically looking for one that can do Saturation vs Saturation, for reasons I’ll go into below. And if not, are there any color savvy Flame artists on here that would be open to sharing their opinion on how important / unimportant this is?
I know the HSV Curves Matchbox shader is close, and I’ve used that one a handful of times. I know it well enough to know that I think it’s “good” but not “great”. In my experience, its Hue vs Hue (Hue_Shift) is great, but a bit limited by its interface. The Saturation adjustment though (Hue vs Saturation) I think really falls short. For instance, if you apply the HSV Curves Saturation adjustment to a color bars, you’ll find that even if you drop the whole Saturation curve to -1 (as low as it goes), it doesn’t adjust the saturation for all the color, just half of it. In real-world examples, I’ve noticed that sometimes it works great, and other times it is unable to fully select the color I would like to adjust.
This topic in general stems from a scenario I’ve run into a few times now-- managing highly saturated neon colors in a color grade. A year ago I created this feature request (shameless self-promotion) which is one solution that takes a page out of Baselight’s book with a tool they call Gamut Compression. It does something very similar to a Saturation vs Saturation hue curve, but only for the most extremely saturated values. It was created to handle scenarios involving bright color sources’ raw RGB data creating low, negative, or clipped values for certain channels and, in turn, these values creating bad artifacts when color management is applied during the color grading process.
At the end of the day, the beauty of color grading is that there are almost always solutions to get the job done with or without the very specific tools. The only thing to consider is how pleasant or simple it is to get where you need to go. If we don’t have a Saturation vs Saturation tool or a Compress Gamut tool, we can always get there with some creative masking and keying; make use of the tone controls’ blacks, whites, and everything in between; or just work the grade until it the problem is solved. But with incredible and unique features like machine learning semantic keyers (aka the hard stuff) already implemented, features like the one discussed here (and others I’d be happy to go into detail about elsewhere) really feel like they’re missing to me.
Happy to hear what others think about this! Thanks for reading.
