What ZoneLAB is, in plain English

ZoneLAB is an OpenFX plugin that maps the image into a grid and assigns an exposure zone to each cell. You get a zone readout per cell, directly over the picture, so you can judge how light sits across the frame without leaving the viewer. It runs as a single tool that combines exposure analysis and grading controls. The product page describes it as built on a Live Zone System and lists it as patent pending.

What ZoneLAB is, in novelty rap.

If you want to hear it in Rap-Form, here is a Video about the Plugin (Hopefully GenAI, but we wouldn’t put it past low-level proto gangstas to do it).

The zone view modes

ZoneLAB includes a 21 zone exposure map with a false colour overlay. It also includes an 11 zone Ansel Adams mode with greyscale zones and roman numeral notation. The interface can show an A B split view for comparing raw versus graded imagery side by side. There is also a Zone Isolate option to highlight only the zones you care about.

Exposure and grading controls

ZoneLAB includes per zone exposure control over shadows, midtones, and highlights, also a suite with temperature, tint, saturation, contrast, and density. For monochrome work, ZoneLAB includes black and white grading with traditional filter simulation and split toning, and film grain with exposure dependent weighting.

Skin Tone Selection lets you select grid cells over faces for targeted exposure work. Auto Expose is a “intelligent scene analysis” with skin tone awareness. If you want the short mental model, ZoneLAB encourages you to fix expsoure where it lives in the frame, then keep grading with the same tool instead of jumping between overlays, scopes, and separate node setups.

Export formats and what they are for

ZoneLAB can export PNG screen grabs via the PNG format, or 16 bit DPX with alpha overlay via DPX. Multi layer EXR export is listed, which aligns with OpenEXR. Those exports can make the zone overlay portable for reviews, notes, and downstream work, but you still want to test them against your own deliverables and comps before you rely on them in production.

Camera profiles and supported log spaces

ZoneLAB lists 22 camera profiles with pre configured dynamic range data for ARRI Alexa 35 and Mini LF, Sony VENICE, FX6, FX3, and A7 V, RED V RAPTOR, KOMODO X, and KOMODO, Canon C300 Mk III, C70, and R5C, Fujifilm X H2S, Panasonic LUMIX S1MII and S5IIX, Nikon Z9 Z8 and Z6 III, plus Blackmagic Design cameras and more.

It also lists 16 log and colour spaces, including DaVinci Wide Gamut, ARRI LogC3 and LogC4, Sony S Log3, RED Log3G10, Canon Log2 and Log3, Panasonic V Log, Fujifilm F Log2, Nikon N Log, and more.

The quick start workflow is simple: apply ZoneLAB to a serial node, set the Color Space to match the camera log format, then pick a camera profile so the tool sets dynamic range.

Performance, requirements, licensing, price

ZoneLAB lists GPU acceleration via Metal compute shaders for real time performance. Requirements are DaVinci Resolve Free or Studio on macOS, an Apple Metal GPU, and macOS 10.15 or later. One purchase includes two machine activations, described as desktop plus laptop. The licence key is generated after purchase and the page says to follow the included instructions. The listed price is £90.00 GBP. Windows support is listed as “coming soon”, with also a compatibility imminent for Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro.

However you plan to use it, treat it like any new grading tool: throw real footage at it, confirm the coluor management and exports, and only then let it into a production pipeline.

https://driftwood-dctl.com/products/zonelab-zone-system-exposure-color-grading-plugin

The post ZoneLAB for Resolve: Ansel Adams and even more zones… first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Autodesk Flame is the finishing suite that lives between conform, comp, and delivery, with companion stations like Flare and render muscle via Burn for facilities that enjoy sleeping sometimes.

The big three: metadata, scribbles, depth

Flame Family 2027 puts a spotlight on three things that tend to break at the worst possible moment: clip metadata, frame-level notes, and depth workflows. The metadata work targets frame-based metadata keys and keeps them intact from import through export. Annotations land as a practical review tool. Flame Family 2027 can add annotations to frames in the Player or in a Viewport, and it can also display the list of annotations on the current frame. Machine learning shows up as a Depth map feature. Flame Family 2027 can generate a Depth map using internal or external machine learning models.

Metadata that survives the trip

Flame Family 2027 treats metadata as something that should survive real production, not just an import dialogue. In Batch, a Metadata node can view and modify the metadata of a clip. Open Clip can define metadata keys and values to be ignored or modified on a per-feed basis, which gives facilities a way to standardise what comes in and how it gets normalised before it spreads everywhere.

Tokens get a larger role in that same cleanup story. Flame Family 2027 can define Custom Tokens and also limit the display of resolved tokens to a chosen number of characters. Preferences can set Custom Tokens to be used throughout the application, and Centralised Components can deploy system-based Custom Tokens across a facility using a dedicated workflow. That combination aims straight at consistency: one naming plan, one token vocabulary, fewer surprises at export time.

There are also Python API additions tied to the new metadata workflow, aimed at facilities that build glue code around ingest, naming, and publishing. The exact scope of those additions is not specified anywhere I could find it.

One detail worth calling out for day-to-day operators: Flame Family 2027 adds context-menu copy and paste for characters in text fields, including Copy Text, Cut, Paste Text, and Delete, plus a Paste Text option when nothing is selected. Dialogs with multiple text fields can also use Tab and Shift + Tab to move between fields, as long as one field is already in editing mode. None of this sells a subscription, but all of it reduces small daily friction that adds up.

About a third of the way in, the mteadata story boils down to this: fewer per-shot fixes and fewer one-off scripts to keep identifiers, flags, and frame-level tags from vanishing mid-pipeline.

Annotations that behave like a real tool

Annotations in Flame Family 2027 are not limited to a single panel or a single kind of workflow. Artists can add annotations to frames in the Player or in a Viewport. Explorer can access a list of Markers and can also display the list of annotations on the current frame. Snapshot can include annotations, which helps when review happens outside the application and you still want the note to travel with the image. Also: They are somewhat accessible via Python, but so far only “.has_annotations” and “.clear_annotations()“. That is a start, but not a full integration into the overarching pipline that keeps the added Memes from Prep intact until delivery.

Effects also gets marker support: Markers and Segment Markers can be added from the Effects environment. That is a quiet workflow bridge between building looks and keeping editorial or review signposts in sync.

Keyboard shortcuts shift a bit to accommodate the new annotation layer. In the Flame keyboard shortcut profile, Delete or Backspace is assigned to Delete. Tracking shortcuts change too: Tracking Delete Current KeyFrame and Go To Previous in Action, GMask Tracer, and Image move from Delete or Backspace to Shift + Delete or Backspace. Search also changes: F12 no longer opens Search; it now opens Toggle Annotations Display instead. Space + Tab still opens Search, and F16 can be used on macOS.

Tangent panel users get new mapper functions for annotations. Tangent Mapper adds Annotations control for toggling the Annotations layer display, plus navigation functions for previous and next annotation. Data management functions are also added, including Clear Unreferenced Cache for the current project and all projects.

Depth maps, now with fewer excuses

Depth maps via machine learning arrive as a production feature in Flame Family 2027.

A Depth map can be generated using internal or external machine learning models. The Tools workflow can generate a Depth Map using a machine learning model, then create a matte from that Depth Map inside a Selective. This positions depth as an artist-facing selection primitive, not just a technical curiosity.

Let’s quote the documentation: New machine-learning-based models are available as Analysis Type options to generate depth data. ML Depth Indoor and ML Depth Outdoor are internal machine learning models, while Load Model allows an external ONNX depth extraction model to be loaded.

The Documentation does not specify which machine learning models exactly are included (or at least, I couldn’t find it), which external model formats are supported, or what hardware constraints apply. Even without those details, the intended use is clear: build depth, turn it into mattes, and iterate quickly.

Like any ML feature, you will still want to test it on your own footage, your own lens mess, and your own deliverables before trusting it in production. That includes checking edges, temporal stability, and failure cases on smoke, hair, reflections, and anything else that enjoys humiliating clever algorithms.

Conform, color, and the rest of the plumbing

Flame Family 2027 also invests in pipeline plumbing, the kind that keeps facilities from inventing new swear words. Conform can import OTIO files in the Conform environment, via OpenTimelineIO. That gives conform artists a more direct path for timeline interchange when the upstream system exports OTIO.

Color management updates land via OpenColorIO, updated to version 2.5.1. The Sources do not describe behavioral changes from that update, only the version number.

Project management adds OpenEXR uncompressed as a Cache and Renders format for floating-point content. For facilities that lean on float caches, this adds another option alongside existing cache formats.

Configuration and OS support expands to include Rocky Linux 9.7. DKU 21.0.0 is listed as Rocky Linux only and includes support for Rocky Linux 9.7 and an updated NVIDIA driver. The Sources do not specify the exact driver version.

Hardware I O support gets AVIO updates with updated AJA and Blackmagic Design drivers. Service Monitor gains new Diagnostics intended to help troubleshoot configuration.

User settings import changes affect Setup. User settings can be imported on a new system before the application is launched for the first time, and importing a user profile overwrites all existing user settings.

Backburner 2027.0 is a minor update with fixes and no visible changes for end users, via Autodesk Backburner. Burn can be installed on macOS workstations, which expands where that render companion can live.

As always, new features and new workflows deserve a proper test pass on real show material before they touch a live delivery schedule.

The post Autodesk Flame 2027: metadata and depth maps first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: tamga is a quick sculpt plus vertex paint sketchpad that hands off via Wavefront OBJ to heavier DCCs like Blender when your scene stops being cute.

Small app, big get-it-done energy

tamga runs in a web browser, on desktop, and as an iPad app. The web version targets browsers with WebGPU. The iPad version requires iPadOS 26.0 or later. The design goes for minimal UI and a low friction workflow. There are no accounts, no subscriptions, and no ads stated for the tool. The tool is also described as offline by choice, with work staying on the device. This makes tamga a handy place to rough shapes, do quick paint passes, and spit out something presentable before you move to the usual monsters.

Sculpting that stays out of your way

Brushes include Clay, Smooth, Inflate, Flatten, and Drag. A modifier flips brush behavior into an alternate mode, and there is a smooth override that temporarily switches to the smooth brush at the same size. Dynamic topology is available per brush and is described as auto-splitting and simplifying as you sculpt. Remeshing rebuilds uniform topology at a chosen voxel density, and version notes mention a Close Holes button in the Remesh pop-up.

Symmetry support includes mirror sculpting across an axis, plus a symmetrize operation that applies symmetry to existing geometry. There are desktop shortcuts for undo and redo, and gesture based undo and redo on iPad.

Masks, booleans, and posing without the drama

You can paint masks to protect areas from other brushes, with an unmask action via the modifier concept. Masks also feed mesh creation. Extract Masked creates a new mesh from the masked region, and Extract Shell creates a thin shell from the mask boundary.

For fast shape bashing, there are primitives with boolean operations: union, subtract, and intersect. A smoothness slider controls how soft the boolean blend is. Positioning uses a gizmo, snapping is on by default, and a modifier disables snapping.

There is also a pose workflow built around placing anchors and dragging to deform, with options to remove anchors, freeze to bake deformation, and clear anchors. tamga comes from galata.ink, and it is a weekend project created outside professional VFX work.

Vertex paint, plus ink lines for style passes

Painting is vertex based, so paint lives on the mesh rather than in UV mapped textures. Channels listed include albedo, roughness, and metallic, with per channel toggles for painting, filling, and clearing.

Ink mode lets you draw ink like strokes on the 3D surface. View styles listed include paper mode, matcap, and PBR. Paper mode has controls such as valleys, peaks, chisel, and a mix control that blends between standard rendering and full paper mode. Render export formats listed are PNG, JPEG, and OpenEXR.

Export, pricing, and the reality check

Import and export uses Wavefront OBJ, so you can hand off to tools like Autodesk Maya or ZBrush when you need deeper pipelines. There is also export to a tamga format, plus auto recovery that saves work and restores after crashes, hopefully. Personal use is free, and personal, educational, and non profit use is free on most platforms. Commercial use requires one time payment of 12.99 USD.

A final note for people who ship frames for a living: test new tools and innovations before you rely on them in production, especially around OBJ round trips and vertex paint persistence. Do one quick scuplt, export it, reimport it, and check if the alebdo channel survives. If it does, you just bought yourself a nimble little idea machine.

https://tamga.galata.ink/

The post Galata.ink Ships Tamga Sculpt and Paint for Browsers first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Blender is the free all in one DCC for modeling, animation, rendering, and export tasks like USD, with Eevee for realtime previews, Cycles for finals, and a Compositor that keeps quietly expanding its job description.

The release vibe: refine, then refine again

Blender 5.1 arrives with a clear theme: make everyday work feel lighter. The focus sits on quality of life improvements, stability, and polish, following a “Winter of Quality” push that solved 350 important issues and also cleaned up code to make future improvements easier.

That mindset shows up everywhere. Some changes are the sort you notice instantly. Others only reveal themselves after a week, when you realize you have not sworn at a dialog box even once. Progress comes in many forms. It is still the same familiar toolset. The difference is how often it gets out of your way.

Raycast: a shader node that likes to ask questions

A new Raycast shader node lands in the material system, built around a simple idea: shoot a ray, get useful surface information back, and use it to drive looks. That unlocks effects that rely on the closest point on a surface from the ray source, or the distance to it. There are demo files showing setups like toon shading and an X ray render effect.

There is also a practical warning: Raycast can be computationally expensive, and baking its output is suggested as a way to improve render times when needed.

Rendering: faster compiles, leaner memory, quicker frames

On the realtime side, Eevee speeds up material compilation by pre processing shader sources. In the standard Barbershop text scene benchmark, GPU shaders compile 25 to 50 percent faster across operating systems. Memory also gets attention. Eevee reduces texture memory use via texture pooling, helping scenes fit into less VRAM.

Cycles picks up performance gains too. GPU rendering improves by about 5 to 10 percent for many scenes, and HIP RT ray tracing is enabled by default on AMD GPUs. If your day includes lots of lookdev iteration, the combined effect is straightforward: fewer pauses between decisions.

Animation and rigging: the biggest speed win in the room

If you care about playback, Blender 5.1 comes with a headline worthy improvement: actions and shape keys evaluate significantly faster, with reported gains ranging from 4 percent to 304 percent in frames per second depending on the file. For cleanup work, the Graph Editor adds a Gaussian smoothing modifier that smooths curves non destructively. It is also explicitly described as resource heavy, with guidance not to use it on too many curves at once.

There are also small but practical timeline and editor touches that help animation feel less fiddly, like interpolation line colors indicating interpolation type in the Dope Sheet and menus.

Compositing and editorial: nodes that earn their keep

The built in Compositor adds a Mask to SDF node. It converts a mask into a Signed Distance Field by computing the distance of each pixel from the mask edges. That supports effects like edge glows, eroding or dilating mask edges, and distance based effects like procedural blurs.

The compositor also gains utility nodes including Boolean, Integer, Vector, and Index Switch, plus support for the existing Radial Tiling node. Speed matters here too. Several key nodes are faster, including Blur, Directional Blur, Vector Blur, Glare, Lens Distortion, and Anti Aliasing, described as 1.2x to 2x faster.

In the Sequencer, the Blade tool adds a box gesture that supports ripple editing, aimed at quicker cutting. Taken together, the message is clear: the VFX and video toolsets are being treated like first class citizens, not the side quest you only visit when your shot count gets scary.

Modeling and sculpt: a pile of small wins

Modeling sees a mix of performance and wrokflow tweaks. Filling for text objects improves, expanding the types of fonts that behave well as 3D text. Filling in general is up to five times faster, especially for n gons with many sides. Snapping adds an option to snap to the center of faces. In sculpt and paint, one visible addition is a Blur brush for blurring surface colors in Sculpt mode.

Grease Pencil: holes, at last

Grease Pencil gets notable workflow improvements, including better handling of strokes and fills and new ways to cut holes in shapes. Holes in fills can be created either via new operators that perform Boolean style operations or via the SVG importer. The draw here is practical: importing SVG and PDF content becomes easier to integrate without the same fill weirdness described in the feature overview. If you have ever built a workaround stack just to preserve negative space, this one lands with a satisfying thud.

Geometry Nodes: more rig friendly, more volume friendly

Geometry Nodes adds a Bone Info node that makes it possible to access bone position data. There are also new nodes for working with volume grids, including nodes for dilating, eroding, and clipping volume grids.

UI, file I O, and pipeline glue

The UI picks up just under 100 fixes and feature improvements, including the ability to search for controls by name in Preferences. Other practical UI touches include resizing quad views interactively by dragging the center point, and copying and pasting nodes between separate instances. On file formats, new options include AVIF export. Updates also land for USD, glTF, and FBX, with FBX files now including Shape Key normals for better compatibility with game engines like Unity.

For pipeline integration, support includes Python 3.13 and OpenColorIO 2.5, matching the CY2026 spec for the VFX Reference Platform. For virtual reality projects, the arc teleportation system is described as completely rewritten, and OpenXR is supported on macOS.

Availability and licensing

Blender 5.1 is a free download. The source code is available under the GPLv3 license. That free and open model is not new, but it still matters. It shapes how fast features get tested in the wild, how quickly workflows spread through studios, and how often a random late night fix becomes a shared win by morning.

The only remaining job is the boring one: install, test, validate, and only then roll it into serious work. Even a tool with a good mood still deserves a proper pipeline check. And yes, the Blender Foundation clearly wants this release to feel like a calm upgrade, not a reinvention.

https://www.blender.org/press/blender-5-1-release/

The post Blender 5.1 is here first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: GIMP is a free, open-source cross-platform image editor for painting and comp work, and it plays nicely with Inkscape when you need vectors and pixels to stop bickering. Think Blender for images.

Momentum, but with fewer faceplants

GIMP 3.2 ships as the first 3.2 release dated 2026 03 14, following a year of design, development, and testing by volunteers and the community, with an explicit plan to streamline releases after 3.0. The headline theme is non destructive layers. Text layers already lived that life. Now Link Layers and Vector Layers join the party, and they come with a new safety latch: you must Rasterize before destructive edits like painting. When you regret that choice, Revert Rasterize clears destructive edits and returns the layer to its non destructive state. That little switch quietly saves hours and reputations.

Link Layers let you pull an external image into a composition and scale, rotate, and transform it without losing quality or sharpness. The layer updates when the source file changes, and you can create one via Open as Link Layer in the File menu. You can also swap the linked file later in Layer Attributes.

Vector Layers arrive through the Path tool. You can draw shapes with adjustable fill and stroke settings, and the vector shape updates as the path changes. Non-destructive rotate, scale, and transform apply here too, so the shape stays editable longer. Yes, we like GIMP, and it is fun to watch the momenutm build when layers start acting like they understand revision notes.

Filters stack higher, and channels get invited

Non-destructive filters now apply to channels, not just layers and layer groups. They also apply to the new non-destructive layer types, so you can keep edits flexible without immediately baking them in. Layer groups get a neat trick: an empty group set to Pass through can carry non-destructive filters that affect all layers below it. Stack multiple filters on that group and you get an adjustment style workflow that stays tidy instead of turning into a layer salad.

A new Vibrance filter lands via updated GEGL. It combines Saturation and Hue Chroma behavior for selective saturation, with a specific goal of keeping skin colors from getting over saturated. You can reach it through the GEGL Operations tool or by searching actions with slash. The release also ships companion updates for babl and GEGL as part of the wider toolchain refresh.

New tools and innovations should be tested before use in prdouction, especially when they touch core layer behavior and color pipelines.

Brushes, text, and other daily annoyances get nerfed

A new paint mode called Overwrite replaces color values as you paint without blending alpha values together. It targets pixel art workflows, and it pairs best with the Pencil Tool.

The MyPaint Brush tool updates to the newer Version 2 API from MyPaint. That upgrade adds 20 new brushes, including an arrow brush, grouped under the Dieterle tag. Text editing gets less in-your-face. The on canvas Text Editor can be dragged out of the way while you type, and it supports common shortcuts like Ctrl plus B, Ctrl plus I, and Shift plus Ctrl plus V for paste unformatted text.

https://peer.tube/videos/embed/64DzkCtrEw9aDr88urpAnj

Exports get more grown up

Format support expands, including built-in support for more formats and export support for JPEG 2000, a standard for digital cinema. Export support is added for PSB large document files, matching existing import support. The DDS plug-in can export BC7. The OpenEXR plug-in can render Luminance Chroma images in full colour rather than grayscale. Vector Layers also affect export: SVG and PDF export can include raster and vector layer data together. Import support is added for AVCI (a HEIF variant with H.264 images encapsulated in HEIF).

The small print, literally and figuratively

On Windows, the downloads page lists supported OS as Windows 10 1903 or newer. Now Windows 7 anymore, and that makes you sad, take loooong look in the mirror. On Linux, distribution options include AppImage, Flatpak via Flathub, and Snap via the Snap Store.

GIMP 3.2.0 is the last version distributed as 32 bit on Windows. Starting with 3.2.2 and later micro versions, there will be no 32 bit Windows build. One side effect is that the 32 bit TWAIN plug in for scanning on Windows stops being distributed, with guidance to use manufacturer scanning software for now and an invitation to help build a 64 bit WIA plug in. Pricing is free, and open source – biut you can always donate, they REALLY have earned some help!

https://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-3.2.html

https://www.gimp.org/downloads/

The post The GIMP Team boosts GIMP 3.2 first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.