Using HECTOR to color-grade with LUTs

06 November 2017

A fun little project I completed on Friday was to get HECTOR running with standard Look-Up Tables commonly used in applications like DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Premier Pro to allow quick and efficient colour-grading of video signals.

This worked out fairly well, and showed how quickly it is with HECTOR to prototype and complete a video filter effect. I started the work late on 2nd November and had it finished on the 3rd, and I was working on other projects at the same time.

Here is a direct link to the module: http://hector.direct/modules/ColorGrader.LUT.html

I'm most likely going to open source the code for this once I've tidied it up a bit, so I'll leave the huge explanation of how it all works until then, but the basics of it is relatively simple. The system uses OpenGL shader language to perform the look-up, so it's quick and works well with live HD video footage. I haven't tried it with 4K yet but I see no reason for it not to work.

Rocketstock.com have a pack of 35 free LUTs you can use to test this with. I've found some LUTs from other sources don't work yet - it seems like I'm having trouble reading all the different CUBE files that are out there. If anyone tests this out and finds a LUT that doesn't work, please send it over to me as it'll help me with debugging.