Getting To Know Lattice

Lattice: LUT Visualization, Creation, Conversion & Manipulation

If you work with LUTs long enough, sooner or later you long for a way to “see” the LUT.

In addition, you probably would love a way to convert or manipulate the LUT.

Many calibration tools allow you visualize LUTs and in some cases manipulate and convert those LUTs, but what do you do if you don’t own calibration software (which is often very expensive)?

Recently through a good friend of Mixing Light and owner of Flanders Scientific, Bram Desmet, I was introduced to Lattice. Several Mixing Light members have also mentioned it in comments on various posts, so I thought it was time to check it out.

So, I’ve been playing with Lattice over the past couple weeks as I prepare a session at NAB and I liked the tool so much I thought an Insight was in order.

I do want to mention that there is a lot of advanced functionality for working with LUTs in Lattice!

In this Insight I want to introduce you to the tool and do some basic manipulations.  In future Insights, we’ll dive deeper.

An Affordable Way To Work With LUTs

Available through the Mac App Store, or directly from the Lattice website, if you are doing a lot of work with LUTs at $199 Lattice is a bargain.

Also, one thing that I think is important when buying such a specialized piece of software is the development team.  Developer Greg Cotten is awesome!

Approachable and willing to help with your LUT questions if you run into a problem, drop Greg and the Lattice a team a line on their website.

As you’ll see in the movie, I can think of no other tool that makes working with LUTs so easy.

Here are some of the highlights of what Lattice can do:

• Visualize – You can view a LUT as a traditional cube or even better – see separate RGB curves for the LUT, making it simple for colorists to see what the LUT is doing to contrast and color.  You can even use Quick Preview On the Mac to see a LUT and its results on a shot.
• LUT Creation – While most of us probably think of using a grading tool like Resolve to create a LUT, you can actually create a LUT (though combination or manipulation) directly within Lattice.
• Convert – Lattice allows you to quickly (literally with the click of a couple of buttons) convert color spaces & function curves.  For example, you could take a P3 LUT and convert it to REC 709. In addition, you can resize any LUT to better fit a particular need. Lattice will do all the math and do it in floating-point precision.
• Isolate – A particularly cool feature of Lattice is the ability to isolate the just the color or contrast of LUT not only making it easier to see how the LUT is effecting the image, but this also allows you to “steal” the contrast or color from a LUT while ignoring the other part.
• Combine LUTs – Maybe you have a film stock emulation you love but you also have a LUT that cools off the shot quite a bit. Using Lattice you can combine those separate LUTs into one.
• Advanced Transforms – Probably the most powerful part of Lattice is the LUT manipulation that you can do. From inverting colors to clamping the output you can easily “clean up” a LUT or tweak it for your particular need.

This is one powerful tool!  To be 100% honest I’m just scratching the surface of Lattice.  Please use the comments below if you have workflows/ideas of what Lattice can do or for specific Insight requests .  

-Robbie

Comments

Homepage › Forums › Getting To Know Lattice

• Creator
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• April 4, 2015 at 11:56 am #33633
  
  Robbie Carman

  Participant

  This is the discussion thread for the Insight: Getting To Know Lattice

• Creator
  Discussion

• 
  Jason Bowdach

  Member

  April 4, 2015 at 1:08 pm

  LOVE LOVE this tool! Been using it all week to design something ill be showing a NAB, and i couldnt live without it now. LUTs are no longer black boxes, or even something I can only break down on a grayscale ramp. I can see EVERY aspect from cube, curve, input and output bounds. Also, the dev is VERY helpful should you run into something that app doesnt support or you would like added. I cant recommend it enough.
• 
  RobbieCarman

  Guest

  April 4, 2015 at 4:09 pm

  100% agreed. Just this week I got some very very odd Ikonoskop LUTs from a client. Cleaned them up in Lattice in minutes vs fighting them in a grade. Excited to hear about how you’ve been using it with your top secret project!
• 
  Jason Bowdach

  Member

  April 4, 2015 at 5:37 pm

  I’ve been using it to develop a “toolkit” of sorts with a lot of common tasks “macroed” as LUTs that I previously never thought would work in LUT form, but only as a powergrade or application specific. Essentially be using it as my LUT verification “gateway” to see exactly what is going on. Funny you mention a client bringing in strange LUTs, I had a client having issues w a set of basic “Look” LUTs not loading into his dailies software. Took me about 5 minutes to rebuild like 20 of them in Lattice with the correct cube format selected, seems Red Giant Bulletproof is picky. I’ve been using it for a lot of the things you discussed, especially scaling, reducing strength, clamping, checking inputoutput bounds, etc. I’ll use it to double check a LUT I created in Resolve or another applications, make sure its not going nuts and is the correct format, etc.
• 
  Willian Aleman

  Guest

  May 28, 2017 at 9:18 am

  Hi Robbie,

  Thanks for the great insight in Lattice.

  I’m looking for an application that allows me to extract the CDL values from an EDL and converter to a plain .CDL without using a command lines tool.
  Does Lattice or any other application do this? I wrote to Lattice vendor, but have not received a response yet.

  Although, Davinci Resolve can import a .CDL, it can only export it in the form of an EDL, resulting in some applications being unable to import the exported file, for example, Comfort – LiveGrade.
  The issue in Davinci Resolve is very well know by colorists and DITs. But Blackmagic Design has not fixed the it in the later upgrade of Davinci Resolve, version 14.

  This is my workflow:
  To create a look with a CDL in Davinci Resolve V. 2.5.2.
  To export the look as a .cdl. (DR’s .edl version of a .cdl)
  To bring the converted .CDL into an second application, in this case, Comfort – LiveGrade V. 3.7.2 or other.
  I have found two tools to do the conversion for the .EDL to CDL. One is by Walter Arrighetti. However, the tools require the user to know working with commands line, which I don’t.
  I need a tool with a GUI to do the conversion. Better if the tool can convert multiple CDLs contained in the EDL as a batch.

  Walter Arrighetti’s tool converter
  https://github.com/walter-arrighetti/edl2cdl
• 
  Rajab Y

  Guest

  December 17, 2021 at 12:31 pm

  Hello, is there any program like this for windows users?
• 
  Ben Critchley

  Member

  August 1, 2022 at 11:23 pm

  Hi, will there be anymore insights with Lattice?
  • 
    Patrick Inhofer

    Administrator

    August 2, 2022 at 8:42 am

    Ben,

    Is there anything specific you’d like to know about Lattice? I’ll put out a call to our Contributors to see if anyone wants to go more in-depth – but it’s always helpful to guide us on where you’d like us to dig deeper.
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