Hi there, long-time Flame artist, no-time colour manager.
I recently asked the wonderful Jeff Kyle on YT about colour management Flame tutorials for absolute colour management n00bs.
I do LOTS of other stuff too, directing, editing, shooting, photography, copywriting so it’s not like I’m Flaming every day, and so I’ve managed to just basically live in Rec709 and deal with log footage when it comes, but lately I’ve been super aware that it’s time to rip the bandaid off and try to pull my stupid compositing head out of the glorious “don’t care about colour management” sand.
I realise I am a Rec709 boy living in a Rec709 world, and when I encounter log footage (ie often) I generally search out the specific camera model and download a lut and use that for conversion. I know the colourmgmt node has these installed already, but I really have no idea how the node actually works.
It’d be great to know how it affects your Batch schematic. Is it like the Action node in that it can fundamentally change everything that happens downstream? Which are the best transformations to use and why? When to convert to one space to do something and then revert back? Should you solely create your projects into Aces because it’s better? (why and when is it better?) (Does this still apply if all my work goes out Rec?) When and how should you view in different modes? What are the differences between Rec709, scene-linear, and Video? What does unknown mean and why is it best to view in that mode?
There is so much information in this beautiful forum about it, but all of it goes over my head, I’d love it if there was a “Baby’s first colour management in Flame tutorial”
I’ve just found this wonderful video one of you posted in an adjacent thread; super helpful.
I think this is the level I can understand.
I did watch the very promising CM in 8-minutes video posted a while ago, but I was definitely lost before I even started. Thanks in advance my friends!
Before you get to Flame specific questions I think it helps to have a good understanding of color more generally.
I would start with concepts like
Linearity of light
Human perception of light
Dynamic range
Monitor/TV display rendering
Scene-referred
Display-referred
Color model
Colorspace
Gamut
Bit depth
Transfer Function
Linear, log, gamma encoding
Camera sensor and image encoding
Image file types
I don’t think you need to have a super strong grasp of all these things before you can move on to more specific Flame questions, but even having a vague sense of what they are will help you navigate and troubleshoot in Flame much better.
I’m glad you found that “How to Colour space” video and it inspired you.
For a very thorough explanation please have a look at this series of videos:
I personally loved it and found it a great starting point to understanding colour management.
You need to have a foundation of understanding before jumping into the tools otherwise you will just be running operations without really know why you are doing it.
this is a super good rundown of main topics and fundamentals , I have just done a colormanagement fundamentals workshop here and this was pretty spot on to what I went over.
In the end we are always dealing with Light into the sensor and light out of the monitor and everything in between is color management
Here’s a few other links I found helpful when I was learning about this stuff.
This white paper is a good primer.
ACES info
ACES Forum
CG oriented, but tons of great info
This is a good Flame reference once you get rolling.
And once you’re done researching, learning, experimenting and finally have an a-ha breakthru…you’ll realize you could’ve just followed Andy’s video linked above.
The biggest thing to remember is that there’s a lot of tech out there but don’t let it inhibit you. We are all making it up as we go along and as the old adage goes, if it looks right it is right.
Really great resources here to keep you busy a while! Here’s a quick and dirty cheat sheet for when to NOT be in linear light for compositing (because there are a lot more reasons to be in there than not when comping):
Anything involving filtering (resizing and sharpening are top two in that list).
Color critical graphics
Tracking
Some blend modes will break (my favorite that breaks so I flip into log and back to linear afterwards is the Photoshop “color” blend mode… highly underutilized IMHO)
Frequency separation can be more difficult, most times I’m doing beauty and using frequency separation I’ll be in log.
I’ll add that color correction in the standard flame color correct tools (excluding master grade) is gonna feel a little weird. Beware the gamma in the traditional flame ColorCorrect node!
Caveat: I’m sure there are more, if you’re ever in ACES or whatever and you think, hmmm, this is not doing what I want, flip you’re self out to log and then flip right back into ACES, it’s a beautiful thing!
I suppose I’ll add to this though that the most immediate positive you’re going to notice while working in linear light is the much much better qualities of blurs (defocus and motion blur get kicked up next level for free) and more photorealistic edge quality when layering things up.
