Convert Filmic OCIO into LUT for Photoshop

Hi guys,
recently I found Filmic for me and it’s totally fine, until I leave Blender.

I want to composite the shot in Photoshop, but it has no OCIO support. What is your workflow?
The OCIO website tells me, to bake Filmic into a LUT, but this isnt very well explained for someone who is not able to do some compiling/script/bash/terminal stuff.

Someone knows how to do it?

Sadly Photoshop is about one of the worst image manipulation applications out there for reasons that are far too numerous to mention here.

That said, it is what it is and some folks will desperately want to manipulate in Photoshop. There are two relatively simple paths to output a display referred image from a scene referred image manipulation application such as Blender.

One is to output the image as a 16 bit TIFF under the Filmic Log Encoding Base view. This will allocate the bits uniformly per stop of intensity, giving you the most dense data to manipulate your image. However, the image will appear log encoded, and lacking contrast. You would need to apply a curves adjustment to the channels. The shape of the curves would be a gentle S shape, with the crossing of your S around 60% of the way to the right of the curves UI window, and 50% of the way up.

The other option is to apply the contrast you want, reduced by one or exactly as-is in a 16 bit TIFF. Slightly lower contrast will give you a little more room for manipulation, but would also require a curve. If you use the precise contrast you want, your image is relative dense, and 1:1.

The final option is to learn how to use the OCIO tool called ocio2icc to make a custom ICC, or optionally, generate a Photoshop LUT. I or someone else here is likely able to help you with the former, but the latter would require a bit of testing given I haven’t used the limited LUT support in Photoshop yet.

One final option is to pick up the free version of Resolve. From that 16 bit log encoded TIFF, you can apply a perfect 1:1 LUT and get maximum density out of your data.

Hope this helps…

Totally agree. The last few days I searched for a solution and was very surprised to see, that Photoshop is in terms of color management so bad. I am not bound to photoshop, but there is no real alternative for me. The only one is Affinity Photo, but this tool didn’t work for me for several reasons. Anyway - I think the Tiff solution is the way to go.
Sadly, I really appreciate to work with multilayer Exr’s in Photoshop, because with this tool its a charm to import everything, but for now no option anymore.

Baking the OCIO could be a solution, but like I’ve said before I am to dumb for this command line thingy.
I would really appreciate a tutorial for this some day, but this is to much to ask for.

The Davinci Resolve way could be a solution - but at the moment a bit to complex for me to get things done. Recently I have no time to ‘learn’ another program, but I am happy you mentioned it for other users. But one sidenote - you are limitied to a given resolution.

Thanks a lot for your help!