Atlas: a new tone map­ping filter for After Effects

Stefan Minning has released a new tone map­ping plug-​​in for After Effects, Atlas. It's a work-in-progress and open-​​sourced under the free GPL license.

Atlas is Win­dows-only for now -- but the full source code is included, which means that any­one can com­pile a Mac ver­sion. Here's more from Stefan...

"So what’s tone map­ping you ask? Accord­ing to Wikipedia:

Tone map­ping is a tech­nique used in image pro­cess­ing and com­puter graph­ics to map a set of colours to another; often to approx­i­mate the appear­ance of high dynamic range images in media with a more lim­ited dynamic range.

The tech­nique is par­tic­u­larly use­ful if you have high dynamic range images, such as ren­dered CG-​​imagery in float­ing point color-​​depth (OpenEXR) or HDR pho­tographs, and you want to bring their broad spec­trum into a range more suit­able for dis­play on a com­puter mon­i­tor or tele­vi­sion screen."

Note: Stefan released [umm sorry, teased instead] another filter recently, Edgar, "which is designed to work in com­bi­na­tion with Nor­mal­ity and gen­er­ates squeaky clean car­toon out­lines. Edgar uses a novel, pro­pri­etary algo­rithm devel­oped specif­i­cally for the pur­pose of con­vert­ing nor­mal passes into line art for use in car­toon and anime pro­duc­tions."