ACES workflow (ICC, OCIO adjustment layers, preserving apprearance)

[Rusher]

Hello all,

I am looking to integrate affinity photo into our pipeline using the aces workflow. I've been designated this task and it seems a bit more difficult than in nuke. The aim is to be able to produce cg renders and textures in a correct colorspace, and avoid the blackbox of colorprofiles that is other photoediting software. 

Currently, I import a rendered image into affinity photo, and i go to the 32-bit preview, and set it to srgb, as that is what my display is. The imported file was appended with acescg so it performs the view transform perfectly to match nuke. I am very pleased with this. I realise that this is a view transform however, and that the image under the hood is still in the working space

How would i go about exporting the image as utility raw, or srgb while achieving the same apparance as the view transform in the 32 bit preview? when i switch to the icc profiles, everything gets screwed up, i assume cause opencolorio isn't being used to color manage the document anymore, but i have noticed there are ocio adjustment layers i was hoping i could use when in the icc profile? 


Many thanks for reading!

Rusher

[Rusher]

Is there a staff email i can contact in reference to the above?

[R C-R]

9 hours ago, Rusher said:

Is there a staff email i can contact in reference to the above?

Look at the bottom of this & most other pages on this site for the "Contact Us" link.

[Callum]

Hi Rusher,

I'm not an expert on this so I may have to call in back up but does the following post by James R explain what you are trying to do at all?

Thanks
C

[Rusher]

Hi @Callum. Thanks for the reply!!

Yes i had already seen that post. It is of a similar type of conversion which i wish to do, with a few caveats. I'm not using blender so macro's with blenders filmic look transform so i don't believe that will won't work for me. My reading of the blender documentation makes me think that this would take me further from what my render is supposed to look like in say srgb, because it's not what we previewed in the render engine, Our renders come out in the acescg space, so we can work with them maintainign as much possible information until they are ready for delivery. As our renders are in ACEScg,I don't believe that they go through a look transform, as in the blender render preview, described in the blender thread.
 

In nuke, there is a similar workflow, you import your image, and you assign it's colorspace, and it gets converted to the documents working colorspace. In nuke our linear colorspace is acescg. The viewer in nuke performs a display transform similar to affinitys 32 bit preview using the OCIO config. With this method they both look the same. However, what i was hoping was that in our pipeline, that we could convert the document to something like pro-photorgb, using the ocio adjustment layer. that would allow us to composite with other assets and export to other programs that can't handle aces. However, when i set my ocio layers input from acescg, to srgb, and turn on the ICC colormanagement, the colors have shifted. I feel like there is a missing step here, to correct some gamma adjustment that has occured but I've only really started to do this workflow so....

Any advice you could give on this would be greatly appreciated. I've been reading about this for a week and it's pretty dense material! Unfortuately there wasn't too much in the documentation or on the youtube channel about those particular adjustment layers.

[Rusher]

Hi @Callum. So i've done more reading, more research, more testing. So this is where things stand.

Image 1: is from Nuke. It is my acescg render, and the viewer is set to raw, so the image so there is no gamma correction going on. The darks look muddy like you'd expect. 
Image 2: I turn on the view transform, (srgb). Pump up the dark, with applied srgb gamma curve. So that's how the image would be viewed on srgb displays.
Image 3: Just a sanity check. I set the display set to raw (so no view transform being applied). Transform is being handled by the OCIO colorspace node (in acescg, out srgb). looked the same as image 2.
Image4. Nuke compared to photoshop. When nuke is  aces color managed matches photoshop under ICC color management. using ICC colormanagement
Image 5: We're in Affinity now. I converted an srgb image from 8 to 32 bit. It changed color....
Just a note. Somehow, clicking unmanaged, then clicking ICC display transform colors have allowed the image to corrected itself (bug possibly?). I mean I'm happy that such a simple thing maintained the color with 32 bit conversion. Just thought I'd point that out.
Image 6: OCIO display transform of srgb image doesn't  match the ICC display transform. Not sure how to comp something with icc colormanagement with aces color management within affinity....
Image 7: Comparing color management between nuke (ACES), photoshop (ICC), and Affinity (ACES). Affinity doesn't match the other 2 when using ACES to view the srgb image. The image is definitely darker in affinity. However photoshop ICC matches nuke ACES color management. So i don't know why affinity aces doesn't match nuke aces.... So my problem is getting documents to match each other essentially. 

Image 7 is the major issue for now. I've tried messing with the color settings in  (e.g., convert opened files to working space, changing the rgb color profiles, etc., not much has helped...

 
Image 8: Definitely a a bug. During my testing i had a couple of ocio colormanaged files open in affinity. if i switched document it broke the colormanagement temporarily. When coming back to the document, the image is completely blown out. If i click on icc or unmanaged, and back to OCIO the blown out effect was fixed. 


 

[Rusher]

Hi @Callum. Any updates with respect to the above? 

[Callum]

On 9/1/2023 at 1:01 PM, Rusher said:

Hi @Callum. Any updates with respect to the above? 

I have asked one of our in-house experts to take a look at this when they have chance I'll give them a remainder this afternoon if they still haven't replied.

[Rusher]

Hi @Callum,
Unfortunately I've not heard back. I've tried tinkering but i've been unsuccessful.