I made a DCTL that brings Lightroom-style controls to Davinci Resolve

[D Verco]

Hey everyone! I wanted to share something I've been working on for the past while - Lumap, a DCTL for Resolve that consolidates all your basic grading adjustments into one intuitive panel.

The Problem I Was Trying to Solve

I got tired of using complex node structures just to do basic exposure, contrast, and saturation adjustments that would look natural. Coming from a photography background using Capture One and Lightroom, I missed having simple sliders in one place that just worked without having to think about CSTs, colour spaces, and multiple different nodes. 

What Lumap Does

Instead of wrestling with lift/gamma/gain wheels, Lumap gives you: 

Photometric exposure - Linear stops like changing exposure in-camera

Temperature and Tint - For white balance

Intelligent contrast - References your source’s format's middle grey without overcooking the toe/shoulder

Brightness - Targets midtones while preserving highlights and shadows

Organic highlight/shadow recovery - create organic, film-like roll-offs that seamlessly blend into your midtones

Smart saturation - Preserves luminance and prevents skin tone oversaturation

Film-style density - Control the intensity and depth of colours you get from subtractive saturation techniques 

 

Why Sliders Instead of Wheels?

Most of us aren't using professional grading panels - we're using mice and trackpads. Sliders are just faster and more responsive for cursor input. Plus, if you're coming from photo editing, this interface will feel immediately familiar.

There's a free demo version so you can test if it fits your workflow. 

https://www.dhyanverco.com/lumap

Would love to hear your thoughts if you give it a try! And happy to answer any questions.

 

[MrSMW]

Cool stuff.

I look forward to trying it later this year when less busy as Lightroom is my go to for stills, but I would like to get out of Adobe in 2026.

👍

[kye]

I've been working on a similar one, but in L*a*b colour space and offering a lot of more advanced tools to quickly do things I do all the time.

One advantage of doing things in a DCTL rather than using the GUI controls is that when grading in Resolve while travelling etc, where you just have a small monitor and no control surfaces etc, you can make the viewer larger (IIRC using Shift-F) and it essentially gives you the viewer and the DCTL control panel on the right-hand-side of the screen, so it's a really efficient layout for grading using only the keyboard/mouse.

@D Verco if you're looking for ideas on how to expand the tool I'd suggest thinking about it for use with power-windows as well as over the whole image.  For example, my standard node graph has about 6 nodes with power-windows already defined that are ready to just enable if I want them.  I have ones for a vignette, gradients for sky and left and right, and four large soft power windows for people where I will typically do things like brighten / add contrast / sharpen, and do basic skin operations like hue rotations / hue compressions / etc.  
Most of the operations I'd do with those windows are covered by your tool, but not all of them, and if a tool can be used for a range of other tasks other than just basic image processing then all the better.
If you're taking a leaf from how Lightroom works, one of the most powerful features I used to use all the time (and wedding photogs would absolutely swear by) was the preset brushes.  I had brushes for skin smoothing, skin brightening, under-eye, redness, etc, and of course they all used the standard Lightroom controls, but in specific combinations they really worked well.

Something to think about.

I'm all for people being able to charge money for their efforts, but in todays climate, the more value you can provide the easier it will be to get people to part with their (often hard-earned) money.

[stephen]

This is an interesting approach. The DCTL basically mimics photo editing and puts all corrections in one node. It is clearly for people who don't want to go deeper in Resolve and color correction/grading in general. They also have some or a lot of Photoshop / Lightroom experience and habits. These Resolve users do exists. I was one of them many years back and I hope your DCTL would find its users.   

For more sophisticated users like me now and basically anybody interested in going deeper into Resovle it is too simple and lacks fine controls. 

For users like me and serious colorists there are many DCTLs that address the complexity problems of split toning, S curve, better contrast, film density, etc. in Resolve. They provide much finer control over each aspect of the image. Most of those DCTLs are created by professional colorists and used by other colorist and editors. I also use some of them. 

Mononodes DCTLs
IridescentColor DCTLs
PixelTools DCTLs
Many free DCTLs 
Cullen Kelly - Contour toolset DCTLs
Waqas Qazi - Qazi's Toolkit DCTLs

Behind those tools also lies a methodology well explained by colorists. For me personally understanding image editing for film and video at a deeper level is much more rewarding process. Once I created my node tree and establish each aspect of the image, editing and color correction is a piece of cake. 

So not for me but there are people who may like your approach.

[toxotis70]

is there a way to control them via Streamdeck ?

[D Verco]

18 hours ago, kye said:

I've been working on a similar one, but in L*a*b colour space and offering a lot of more advanced tools to quickly do things I do all the time.

One advantage of doing things in a DCTL rather than using the GUI controls is that when grading in Resolve while travelling etc, where you just have a small monitor and no control surfaces etc, you can make the viewer larger (IIRC using Shift-F) and it essentially gives you the viewer and the DCTL control panel on the right-hand-side of the screen, so it's a really efficient layout for grading using only the keyboard/mouse.

@D Verco if you're looking for ideas on how to expand the tool I'd suggest thinking about it for use with power-windows as well as over the whole image.  For example, my standard node graph has about 6 nodes with power-windows already defined that are ready to just enable if I want them.  I have ones for a vignette, gradients for sky and left and right, and four large soft power windows for people where I will typically do things like brighten / add contrast / sharpen, and do basic skin operations like hue rotations / hue compressions / etc.  
Most of the operations I'd do with those windows are covered by your tool, but not all of them, and if a tool can be used for a range of other tasks other than just basic image processing then all the better.
If you're taking a leaf from how Lightroom works, one of the most powerful features I used to use all the time (and wedding photogs would absolutely swear by) was the preset brushes.  I had brushes for skin smoothing, skin brightening, under-eye, redness, etc, and of course they all used the standard Lightroom controls, but in specific combinations they really worked well.

Something to think about.

I'm all for people being able to charge money for their efforts, but in todays climate, the more value you can provide the easier it will be to get people to part with their (often hard-earned) money.

I'm actually doing saturation in LAB. There's a couple of difference colour/ gamma spaces being used to get better results than you'd get from Resolve's basic tools. 

And great point on the UI with DCTL's as a side panel. I find resolve's ui to be designed around control panels, which most people don't have. 

I think adding an vignette adjustment could definitely be possible. But other power window/ brush masks might be be off using Resolve's tools on the node. You definitely should be able to use it with power windows though. 

I do like the idea of having those retouching tools in Resolve, but I think it might have to be done in openfx as DCTLs have limitations. 

Also I originally want to add something like Capture One's colour editor or a hue control, but then Resolve added the colour slice tool. And while there are better possible implementations it did feel mostly redundant.

[D Verco]

17 hours ago, stephen said:

This is an interesting approach. The DCTL basically mimics photo editing and puts all corrections in one node. It is clearly for people who don't want to go deeper in Resolve and color correction/grading in general. They also have some or a lot of Photoshop / Lightroom experience and habits. These Resolve users do exists. I was one of them many years back and I hope your DCTL would find its users.   

For more sophisticated users like me now and basically anybody interested in going deeper into Resovle it is too simple and lacks fine controls. 

For users like me and serious colorists there are many DCTLs that address the complexity problems of split toning, S curve, better contrast, film density, etc. in Resolve. They provide much finer control over each aspect of the image. Most of those DCTLs are created by professional colorists and used by other colorist and editors. I also use some of them. 

Mononodes DCTLs
IridescentColor DCTLs
PixelTools DCTLs
Many free DCTLs 
Cullen Kelly - Contour toolset DCTLs
Waqas Qazi - Qazi's Toolkit DCTLs

Behind those tools also lies a methodology well explained by colorists. For me personally understanding image editing for film and video at a deeper level is much more rewarding process. Once I created my node tree and establish each aspect of the image, editing and color correction is a piece of cake. 

So not for me but there are people who may like your approach.

I've seen and tried many of those other plugins and they're fantastic, which is why I wanted to take a different approach (and more affordable) with Lumap. I've found a lot of workflows in Resolve involve complex node trees meaning you're jumping across multipe nodes for basic adjustments. For instance, Mononodes has around 5 DCTLs for colour adjustments. 

Contour has 8 parameters for contrast. I've seen another that had over 10. What I like about Capture One/ Lightroom is that the contrast adjustment is built to just look naturally good. Paired with highlight/ shadow/ brightness sliders it gives you a lot of control, very quickly. 

The great thing is that for people who do want to go really deep those tools are already there. 

 

[D Verco]

16 hours ago, toxotis70 said:

is there a way to control them via Streamdeck ?

Apparently it's not a great experience

[kye]

51 minutes ago, D Verco said:

I'm actually doing saturation in LAB. There's a couple of difference colour/ gamma spaces being used to get better results than you'd get from Resolve's basic tools. 

And great point on the UI with DCTL's as a side panel. I find resolve's ui to be designed around control panels, which most people don't have. 

I think adding an vignette adjustment could definitely be possible. But other power window/ brush masks might be be off using Resolve's tools on the node. You definitely should be able to use it with power windows though. 

I do like the idea of having those retouching tools in Resolve, but I think it might have to be done in openfx as DCTLs have limitations. 

Also I originally want to add something like Capture One's colour editor or a hue control, but then Resolve added the colour slice tool. And while there are better possible implementations it did feel mostly redundant.

Definitely agree that lots of operations are better done in colour spaces other than the ones supported by Resolve natively.  Are you using OKLab for your Lab conversion?  I plan in integrating that into my tool once I get back to developing it.

I'd keep all the secondary adjustments like vignetting etc as power-windows in Resolve, as getting a single vignette slider that looks good across many/all scenarios probably isn't possible.

I haven't played with spatial adjustments in DCTLs yet, so I'm not sure what the performance hit is compared to OpenFX tools.  I'll probably investigate this at some point though, as there are a few operations I'd do that might benefit from being integrated into a single DCTL.

I played with the colour slice tool and I think it is actually very disappointing as I found it broke images incredibly quickly, while also simultaneously being too broad for lots of adjustments I'd like to make.  I've had much more success in doing more targeted adjustments in Lab that didn't go anywhere near breaking the image.  I find Lab is a far cleaner space to work in for lots of operations as the things you might want to do that are colour-slice-esque are often far simpler and far more universal.  There are tonnes of things you can do in Lab that target certain ranges but are applied globally, so won't break the image, like how doing (most) adjustments with the Channel Mixer can't break the image.