We Make Plugins Too!

The Origin of Our Custom Tools

I’ve always wanted to make certain tools for my own work, but I just never quite found the time to get involved in the coding part of things. However, with the advent of AI coding tools, I found myself inspired to get back to making these tools. I could just tell Gemini which mathematical formulae to use and where, and Gemini would just take care of the laborious typing out the code part. This sped up the process so much that I could focus on the core functions and math, the layout and features and once that’s done, gemini could whip up the rest of the code in seconds. So in just a few days, I had already made a lot of the tools I had been meaning to make for years! Mind you, not all of these tools are useful as such - but I had those ideas and just wanted to see what happens. Some of them produced quite interesting results.

A DCTL (DaVinci Color Transform Language) allows colorists to write custom math that processes image data pixel by pixel. By building our own mathematical models for film emulation, halation, and contrast, we gained total control over our pipeline.

Negative Lab Amateur

As the name playfully suggests, Negative Lab Amateur is my streamlined take on film negative inversion. Sometimes you just don't need a massive, bloated suite of tools to flip a film scan. You just need clean math, robust white balance controls, and an easy way to dial in the base density and contrast. I built this DCTL to provide a fast, reliable inversion process that instantly gets you to a great starting point, letting you focus on the creative grade rather than fighting the initial conversion.

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DensityDawg

The primary tool of this roster however is DensityDawg. I wanted a tool that would add density to colors without trying to emulate film or without having to use HSV. I never found such a tool anywhere. I had a rough idea for what the underlying mathematics should be, so when Gemini 3.1 pro came out, I decided to give it a shot. Lo and behold, within an hour or two, the first version of DensityDawg was ready. It took me 9 tries to get the math and signal pipeline dialed in just right, but the results were already extremely promising. So I reached out to some of the colorists I admire like Mark Todd Osborne, Yash Soni and a few others who graciously offered feedback. Within a month or so, v2.0 was ready. The plugin expanded from just one slider to a complex, fully featured tool which I’m quite proud of.

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Day For Night

Another prominent tool in our suite is the Day For Night DCTL. Getting a convincing night look from daylight footage usually requires complex node trees and precise qualifying. We built this tool to handle the heavy lifting, shifting the luminance and chrominance in a way that mimics how our eyes and film stock actually perceive moonlight. It's not perfect just yet and I'll be developing it further, but it already has enough flexibility to be pretty useful.

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Mion's Patch Gen

Signal analysis is a crucial part of developing color tools and understanding how different operations affect the image payload. To make this easier, I built Mion's Patch Gen. It generates precise RGBCMY saturation ramps directly within DaVinci Resolve. This provides a clean, mathematically pure reference point for testing density, clipping, and color separation without needing to import external test patterns.

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Plugin Interfaces

A quick look at the custom UI we've built for these tools inside DaVinci Resolve. We focused on keeping the controls intuitive while exposing exactly the parameters needed for precise grading.

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Why I'm Releasing These For Free

Look, this is kind of a hobby for me. I don't want people to pay for something that I consider a hobby. Moreover, I don't want to falsely claim to have something groundbreaking and charge people for it. These are useful tools, but I'm not sure how they will be perceived by my fellow colorists or other users in general. Besides, I don't think people would actually pay for a tool like this. That said, if you would like to, I do accept donations and it would really be tremendously helpful as I'm not rich, heheh!

- Amitabh (Mion)