I recently made some small updates to 3 of my Nuke Gizmos. None of them really warrant an entire blog post, so we'll call this post more of a "changelog".

QuickGrade

I made the QuickGrade Gizmo to be a fast, lightweight color correction tool for making common adjustments to a wide variety of clips. It's pretty great at doing just that, with one exception.

One of the most common "image balancing" adjustments is remapping the black and white points of a clip; usually with a Grade node. In the Grade node, one typically uses the Eyedropper to select the brightest and darkest pixels in the image as the Whitepoint and Blackpoint, respectively. This is ostensibly "calibrating" the other knobs in the tool. Once the black and white points have been set, the Lift and Gain knobs are used to set the new values for the darkest and brightest pixels in the frame. They are, by default, set to 0 and 1, having the effect making the darkest pixel value 0 (pure black) and the brightest value 1 (solid white).

In the 1.0 version of QuickGrade, I did include Blackpoint and Whitepoint controls, but I made them Floating Point Sliders, not RGBA Sliders, so the Eyedropper tool was unavailable for selecting pixels from the image. This has now been rectified.

Compare Side-by-Side and Compare Vertical

I continue to find both of these incredibly simple Gizmos to be indispensable to my day-to-day work. Which would make you think I'd have noticed, long ago, that they didn't work when an image had an alpha channel of solid black.

Especially considering that the Gizmos already had the Shuffle nodes in them to replace the alpha with solid white. But, for some idiotic reason, I left the Shuffle nodes in their default configuration, doing nothing at all to the image. This has now been rectified and these Gizmos will work with all images.

Go Get 'Em

The Downloads page has been updated with the latest versions of the Gizmos, so head on over there to get your updates. Seacrest out.