ACES Color Space Alias with External Assets

Hello @KevinD

Welcome to the forums. This problem happens to artwork if you convert to ACES using an inverse tone mapping.

The automated ColourMgt function ViewTransform is great for getting graded rec.709 footage into HDR colour spaces like ACES but it is a little bit of a hack. SDR into HDR will just be a guess but for an image it works well and you would expect bright areas like skies or light sources to have high values.

However when it comes to artwork or screen inserts this type of conversion is much less desirable. You no longer want bright whites to have the value of the sun.

Use InputTransform instead to have your values convert to ACES but have your values stay within 0-1.
(In Nuke they call this Utility-Texture)

I think @randy talks about this very neatly in his 8 min into to ACES video. You should check it out:

Or this thread here:
White’s crunched up after view transform

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