Digital Color Principles, Color Management Fundamentals & ACES Workflows

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1032383615

https://draftdocs.acescentral.com/background/whats-new/

ACES 2.0 is the second major release of the components that make up the ACES system. The most significant change is a new suite of rendering transforms whose design was informed by collected feedback and requests from users of ACES 1. The changes aim to improve the appearance of perceived artifacts and to complete previously unfinished components of the system, resulting in a more complete, robust, and consistent product.

Highlights of the key changes in ACES 2.0 are as follows:

• New output transforms, including:
  • A less aggressive tone scale
  • More intuitive controls to create custom outputs to non-standard displays
  • Robust gamut mapping to improve perceptual uniformity
  • Improved performance of the inverse transforms
• Enhanced AMF specification
• An updated specification for ACES Transform IDs
• OpenEXR compression recommendations
• Enhanced tools for generating Input Transforms and recommended procedures for characterizing prosumer cameras
• Look Transform Library
• Expanded documentation
  

Rendering Transform

The most substantial change in ACES 2.0 is a complete redesign of the rendering transform.

ACES 2.0 was built as a unified system, rather than through piecemeal additions. Different deliverable outputs “match” better and making outputs to display setups other than the provided presets is intended to be user-driven. The rendering transforms are less likely to produce undesirable artifacts “out of the box”, which means less time can be spent fixing problematic images and more time making pictures look the way you want.

Key design goals

• Improve consistency of tone scale and provide an easy to use parameter to allow for outputs between preset dynamic ranges
• Minimize hue skews across exposure range in a region of same hue
• Unify for structural consistency across transform type
• Easy to use parameters to create outputs other than the presets
• Robust gamut mapping to improve harsh clipping artifacts
• Fill extents of output code value cube (where appropriate and expected)
• Invertible – not necessarily reversible, but Output > ACES > Output round-trip should be possible
• Accomplish all of the above while maintaining an acceptable “out-of-the box” rendering

https://www.colour-science.org/anders-langlands/

This page compares images rendered in Arnold using spectral rendering and different sets of colourspace primaries: Rec.709, Rec.2020, ACES and DCI-P3. The SPD data for the GretagMacbeth Color Checker are the measurements of Noburu Ohta, taken from Mansencal, Mauderer and Parsons (2014) colour-science.org.

“The list should be helpful for every material artist who work on PBR materials as it contains over 200 color values measured with PCE-RGB2 1002 Color Spectrometer device and presented in linear and sRGB (2.2) gamma space.

All color values, HUE and Saturation in this list come from measurements taken with PCE-RGB2 1002 Color Spectrometer device and are presented in linear and sRGB (2.2) gamma space (more info at the end of this video) I calculated Relative Luminance and Luminance values based on captured color using my own equation which takes color based luminance perception into consideration. Bare in mind that there is no ‘one’ color per substance as nothing in nature is even 100% uniform and any value in +/-10% range from these should be considered as correct one. Therefore this list should be always considered as a color reference for material’s albedos, not ulitimate and absolute truth.“