Monday, January 16th, 2017 Posted by Jim Thacker

Natron 2.2 ships

This 2015 trailer for Natron shows features introduced in versions 1 and 2 of the open-source compositor. Natron 2.2, the source code for which has just been released, adds 16 new plugins to the software.


Natron’s development team has just released version 2.2 of the open-source compositor, adding 16 new plugins to the software, including a range of new keying, retiming, blur, denoise and colour correction tools.

A free, pipeline-friendly VFX compositing package
Developed at French public computer science research institution Inria, Natron is intended to provide a VFX-capable node-based compositing tool with a familiar Nuke-like UI.

It includes toolsets for compositing, tracking and rotoscoping, and provides a 32-bit floating-point linear pipeline, supporting the OpenColorIO colour-management and OpenImageIO file import/export frameworks.

Natron is released under an MPL V2 licence, meaning it can be used for commercial work, and supports OpenFX plugins, including GenArts’ Sapphire and The Foundry’s software.

New in Natron 2.2: new keying, retiming, blur, denoise and color conversion tools
The main features in Natron 2.2 are the 16 new plugins, introduced in beta during the 2.1 series of releases, and now considered a stable part of the software.

These include PIK, a new per-pixel difference keyer, and PIKColor, a supporting tool for generating a clean plate from each frame of a video; and the self-descriptive HueKeyer.

The update also introduces SlitScan, a new per-pixel video retiming system.

In addition, there are a number of new tools for blurring and sharpening images, including edge blur and DenoiseSharpen, a wavelet-based denoising plugin.

The update also introduces lookup-curve-based colour correction tool HueCorrect, and a range of options for converting footage between linear and logarithmic color space, including that used in Cineon files.

Other changes in Natron 2.2 include the option to launch the software in 32-bit mode on Mac OS X, and the enabling of real-time OpenGL rendering by default for plugins that support it.

Availability and system requirements
Natron 2.2 is available for Windows 7+, Mac OS X 10.6+ and a range of common Linux distros. It runs on both 32-bit and 64-bit systems.

At the time of posting, the source code for version 2.2 has been made available, but the compiled binaries haven’t yet made their way onto the download page.


Read a full list of new features in Natron 2.2

Visit the Natron website