Easily Emulate Vintage Lenses With The New ‘LensNode’ DaVinci Resolve Plugin

Node Mill LensNode Emulation Plugin

Actually, shooting projects on lots of different lenses at once is, frankly, impossible. Or, it is highly improbable and would require a considerable amount of time and money. This new emulation plugin should be a fun way to explore and tinker with your cinematography.

The plugin enables users to access an expanding library of unique lens profiles, enhancing their footage. Users can combine characteristics from different lenses to create new, never-before-seen lenses as well.

The plugin enables users to edit with a single slider, allowing them to exaggerate the effects of a lens profile and quickly create new and interesting effects. All parameters can be animated, and individual characteristics are tunable too.

Accurately Profiled Features

What’s cool about LensNode, too, is that it will also offer presets based on a series of data captures in different conditions, which you can then dial in with pixel-accurate detail. Here are some of the main effects that you can try out:

• Coma: Comatic Aberration is one of the most challenging effects to recreate without LensNode, and one of the most critical to the look of many vintage lenses. Easy to mistake for bloom or softness, the unique shape, hue, and direction of this aberration are the keys to great lens emulation.
• Distortion: Lens distortion is the first touchstone when emulating lenses in visual effects, and accurate distortions are built into the foundation of LensNode. The distortion, like everything else in LensNode, can be animated, and it's automatically scaled to fill the frame.
• Bloom: The high-performance, accurate, exponential falloff bloom in LensNode brings unmistakable softness and contrast to the image. Captured and profiled at 14-bit, this bloom rivals the best diffusion filter plugins on the market.
• Chromatic Aberration: Lenses split unique wavelengths of light depending on their shape and material. LensNode creates hue-accurate aberration with a smooth falloff, remaining true to the original character of each lens.
• Bokeh Blur: LensNode's modelling not only extends to capturing the unique bokeh shape of each lens for edge blur and softening, but also rotates it before convolution, making it one of the most accurate lens blurs available. This makes LensNode capable of swirly bokeh, too, including for lenses that don't naturally exhibit this feature.
• Vignette & Color Cast: Vignettes are captured straight from the real lens, and normalized to the exposure of your shot. LensNode vignettes also include subtle hue shifts towards the edge of frame, just like a real lens. Color casting is captured in 14-bit raw color, and can be set to affect the whole image, or just the corners.
• Fringing: LensNode has the ability to emulate the fringing on high contrast areas that some lenses exhibit. The combination of fringing, coma and chromatic aberration are the main characteristics that give a lens its overall texture. LensNode's fringing can also vary in hue, saturation and lightness across the image from the center to the edges.

Overall, LensNode is fully GPU-powered and promises to be blazing fast out of the box with plenty of quick optimization settings for faster playback on high-res footage ready at your disposal.

Price and Availability

LensNode is currently in Early Access and is available for purchase at a discount on Node Mill’s website here. There is no free trial, but the Early Access does include the following:

• Both the macOS and Windows versions.
• Two seats per license total, across both Mac and Windows installs.
• Regular bug fixes, updates, and new features through the Early Access Period
• When LensNode reaches version 1.0 in mid-2025, you'll get another year of updates for free. After that, your license will never expire.
• More professional cine-lenses and other sought-after looks coming soon.

Invite-only access to the Node Mill community discord for feature-requests, feedback opportunities, and a direct line to the Node Mill team.