ZHiCK Color Matcher
Live per-frame colour match, with a draggable sampling region
01What it does
Matches a Source image to a Target reference and keeps matching it, live, on every frame — drop it in, connect Target, done. Drag the Region box in the viewer to sample only the patch that actually corresponds between the two shots, which is what makes it work for a CG element sitting on a specific piece of background. Temporal median rejects per-frame flicker from grain and motion; Smooth Blend eases the match when the content genuinely changes. Recover White pulls back the colour cast the match adds to highlights when the reference is heavily graded. Bake Match freezes the result into editable Gain and Offset, or into a Nuke Grade node, so the plugin is not needed at render time. Two algorithms: Black/White percentile matching, and Reinhard mean/std for grainy footage with no clean black or white point. General OFX context, 8/16/32-bit, RGB and RGBA, CPU multi-threaded.
02Specifications
- Runs in
- Nuke
- Category
- Color
- OFX API
- 1.5
- Contexts
- General
- Bit depths
- 8-bit · 16-bit · 32-bit float
- Channels
- RGB · RGBA
- GPU acceleration
- CPU, multi-threaded
- Vendor
- ZHiCK
03The 14-day trial
The trial is the complete plugin — every control, your own footage, no features held back. One trial per machine.
When it ends the plugin keeps loading and keeps rendering the full effect, with a faint ZHiCK STUDIO watermark across the output. It does not vanish from the node list or fail a render: a licensing problem found at 2am should cost an obviously marked frame, never a farm job. Nothing about the paid version differs except the watermark.
04Installing it
ZHiCK Hub installs and updates the plugin for you, and is how the trial is issued. If you would rather not run it, the plugin is a folder you copy into the host's plugin path.
05Version history
- 1.4
5 Aug 2026 · 0.1 MB
Region box fix: a box that misses one input entirely (for example a tightly-bounded element) now falls back to sampling that whole input instead of silently cancelling the match. A box that partially overlaps still samples just the overlap.
- 1.3
5 Aug 2026 · 0.1 MB
Fixes Nuke crashing the first time an unlicensed node was viewed (1.1-1.2): the licence notice tried to open a dialog from the render thread - removed, the watermark itself is the signal. Licence changes still apply live from ZHiCK Hub with no host restart, and the check no longer depends on the host apps bundled VC runtime. 1.2 was withdrawn; this build supersedes it.
- 1.1
5 Aug 2026 · 0.1 MB
Unlicensed mode reworked: the full effect now renders with every control live, and the magenta bars are replaced by a faint ZHiCK STUDIO watermark tiled over the output. Licensed rendering is unchanged.
- 1.0
3 Aug 2026 · 0.1 MB
First public build. Live per-frame colour match with a draggable sampling region, temporal median, and Bake Match to Gain/Offset or a Nuke Grade node.
06Still deciding?
Ask me anything about it — whether it fits your shot, your host version, or your pipeline. I built it for my own work, so the answer is usually specific.
zhickstudio@gmail.com