DCTL Favorites and recos...

Thought I would start a thread here about sharing what your favorite DCTL's are and sharing why you like them. I should say I don't need any of these DCTL's and can do pretty much everything they can do with the default tools available in Resolve. While that's true I use these because I prefer the workflow they afford me. If you're on a budget and don't want to spend the money, you'll be perfectly fine without these. If you're streamlining your workflow and looking for options then DCTL's are an amazing way to tweak how you do things in Resolve.

My favorites to date are...

Ravengrade Cinelook (link below to video) - I place this near the start of my node tree and use this as an initial global adjustment to better set my starting point for the grade. By default I have it set with 'Disable Look' checked on and use the sliders to balance out the shot. I find this puts all the initial adjustments in one place and is a perfect starting point for my grading.

Pixeltools HueShift (link below to page) - I've been retouching commercial advertising projects for over 20 years and one of the tools I use most often in Photoshop is Selective Color. I find HueShift gives me a very similar toolset for fine tuning and adjusting colours all in one node. Resolve's new Color Slice is very similar however I still prefer the DCTL setup in a single node where I can access the full feature set of HueShift. I would like to see optional White and Black slider adjustments here as well where users could fine tune these as needed.

https://pixeltoolspost.com/products/pix ... shift-dctl

Kaur Hendrikson Filmic Contrast (link below to video) - I really like this DCTL for adjusting contrast when grading. It puts pretty much all the adjustments I'd like to make to the overall contrast in one place. That being said, I've been using curves in Photoshop for over 20 years and often jump between using a custom curve in Resolve to using contrast adjustments via a DCTL. I tend to default to the DCTL and if I need to really get in there and finesse things I'll use a custom curve.

Let others here know what your favorite DCTL's are and why you like them! Looking forward to seeing what other Resolve users are enjoying in their workflow.

I have 112 DCTL's loaded, loads more on a drive but not installed... Here's my top choices for each group of thought:

Creative:
LMT color Balance
Colors (similar to “color slice” but 16 vectors)
KH Gamut compress v1.1

Film look tools:
LMT PFE
Film Density
Film matrix add
Halation / Munth

Technical:
ACES combo
Blanking red
macbeth chart
Ramp

Filmic Contrast by Kaur is great. I haven't figured out what it does different but there's something it does to add the impression of detail.

Tetra by Paul Dore for creative color mood.

Iridescent Color's free Saturator and Tetra for subtractive saturation and density adjustments.

I also have Ravengrade Cinelook but only use it for shadow and highlight tweaking.

I sometimes use Paul Dore's GRADE for highlight compression too.

@ Michael
when u mention Paul Dore's "grade" are you refering to "FilmGrade" or "VideoGrade"? both inspired by Baselight4's tools?

or is there another Grade operator i missed?

i do use FilmGrade in node 1 of every shot and SoftClip" on the last node of every shot i've graded for years now, but run them as an OFX not DCTL's

It's this one:

https://github.com/baldavenger/DCTLs/bl ... E_OFX.dctl

I think it was based on his LMT_GRADE_OFX.dctl but to work in rec709.

ahh, makes sense, i have LMT_Grade, i work in ACEScct near 100% of the time - so a 709 version is not that useful in my workflow

I use it in Davinci Wide Gamut Intermediate, where the "Highs" slider provides nice highlight compression.