ACES, the mighty beast of colors

[Margus Voll]

Wrote a little thing about color workflow that seems confusing to many.
Hope it helps to clear it up a bit.

http://www.iconstudios.eu/workflow/aces-the-mighty-beast-of-colors/

[Adam Fiori]

Thanks for posting this!

[Morgana McKenzie]

Great blog post! 

[Christian Berg-Nielsen]

Great post indeed!

One question. Is ACEScc the most common working colour space? I’m using ACEScct and thought this was the most common. For me the blacks and lift operations feels much nicer in ACEScct


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[Orash Rahnema]

@Christian Berg-Nielsen ACEScc and cct are the same, where the only difference is that cct has a "toe", so the blacks are a little lifted with a very small "soft clip" 

this has been done because any other flavour of ACES otherwise tend to keep whatever is at 0 level untouched giving a sticky feeling in the blacks that most of the time are a pain to deal with

So most of the user that don't have access different drt gravitates toward ACEScct but it's not mandatory, using ACEScc ensure you that whatever is at 0 stays at 0, so if ones  grading stile has always pure blacks then this might help as one will end up pushing  the whole signal to accomodate those sticky blacks that i was mentioning before

 

[Margus Voll]

I would also go as far and say that the tools behavior changes are marginal but getting errors due negative values in shadows is more of a reason to use cct.

Maybe resolve and some other tools could address that so going under 0 value does not result in negative (pink and blue pixel noise)

[Anton Meleshkevich]

On 9/14/2020 at 6:19 PM, Christian Berg-Nielsen said:

Is ACEScc the most common working colour space?

Netflix recommends using ACEScct instead of ACEScc.
I like the idea of a real logarithmic transfer curve of ACEScc, but unfortunately it has noticeable artifacts in the shadows. It's less noticeable with Alexa, but I often get bright pixels in the shadows with Red cameras as Margus mentioned. So I stick with ACEScct.