Free exposure and color instruments for DaVinci Resolve, standardized on ITU-R BT.1886. Most false color reads the camera. These read the finished image — apply them to graded material, or to a reference still, and grade until the two paints agree.
It converts every pixel to the light your display actually emits, measures how far that sits from mid-gray — where a properly exposed 18% gray card lands — and paints the answer, one hue per stop: gray at zero, warm hues above — yellow +1, orange +2, red +3 — cool hues below: green −1, teal −2, on down through blue and purple. One stop = double or half the light. White is a clipped highlight — a signal fact, not a brightness guess. Black is a shadow at the signal floor, no detail left to recover. Drag Exposure Offset until skin lands in the reference band: the slider value is your distance to the look, in stops. It also works forward, on set: shooting a stop over to pull back down in the grade? Set the offset to −1 and the paint shows where everything will sit after the pull, while you monitor the hot image. Flip Half Stops and the buckets tighten to 0.5 — halves paint as the dim shade between the two neighboring hues.
Exposure Offset · Half Stops · Mid Gray Anchor · Paint Opacity · Legend Side
Download DCTL · 9 KBHow much color does each pixel carry? Vector paints saturation as a numbered level, 0 to 9 — 0 is nearly neutral, 9 is the top of the scale, white is beyond it. It measures what the vectorscope measures — how far a color sits from neutral — but shows the answer on the image itself, so you see where the saturation lives. The Scope Range slider sets how much of the vectorscope the scale covers: keep it identical on reference and shot, and the levels compare directly. Graded material lives in the innermost few percent; this is the magnifier.
Scope Range % · Paint Opacity · Legend Side · Range readout in legend
Download DCTL · 9 KBA spot meter inside the grade. Two points, each averaging a small patch of the image, read two ways: in signal percent — where the waveform sits — and in stops: how many doublings of light the patch sits above or below mid-gray, as the BT.1886 display actually emits it. One stop up is twice the light. Δ is A minus B in stops — which is a lighting ratio: 1.0 is 2:1, 1.6 is 3:1, 2.0 is 4:1. Texture-based — apply through the DCTL OpenFX plugin.
Point A / B position · Sample Radius · Readout position + scale · Mid Gray Anchor
Download DCTL · 11 KBThe Exposure 1886 paint baked to a 33-point LUT, light enough for on-set monitors. Frozen at defaults, no legend; in Resolve, use the DCTLs.
Download .cube · 0.9 MBCopy the DCTLs into Resolve’s LUT folder, restart, and apply through the DCTL OpenFX plugin. Everything expects graded Rec709 / BT.1886 (Gamma 2.4) — if your timeline is log, convert first, then measure after the conversion.
Stop-mapped false color has prior art in the EL Zone System, built for camera log. These instruments work the other end of the pipeline: reading the finished image backwards.