Sculpting Color Spaces

Color correction with a long chain of keyers and math operators, even in the hands of experienced artists, often induces artifacts such as muddy colors or malformed edges. Inspired by tools which display a 3D color histogram [COL 2007], and Flame's Color Wrapper [WRA 2019], we embarked on building a user-friendly 3D color space sculpting toolset which allows a user to make complex and elegant color alterations quickly, intuitively and effectively. In this paper, we will show how smooth transitions can be achieved by our tool through a combination of soft-selection, LUT auto-filling, and tetrahedral interpolation. Multiple approaches for interactive selection and highlighting were introduced to overcome the inaccurate and esoteric manipulation when applying similar 3D based tools to point clouds of colors. Our tool has been robustly integrated with the color correction pipeline through the ability to import and export industry standard 3D LUT files. We have found success for our tool in a number of color-manipulation-related tasks, such as: denoising, despilling, and standard grading.