Vray LWF and Color-Management.

[rajdarge]

Ok having read a number of tutorials etc on LWF.
I get that most images are at gamma 2.2 and need to be converted to 1.0 to optimise render calculations, and that the output from max then needs a 2.2 gamma curve applied to look nice on my sRGB screen. From my reading I understand that I need to maintain the 2.2 gamma for bumps and displacement maps etc. It does seem like a discussion about luminance rather than colour?

Coming from the wilderness of photography: the waters get even muddier over there. We have the notion of colour space. It comes in flavours of sRGB, Adobe-RGB, Pro-foto RGB and the big daddy Lab Color.

SO what is the output of V-ray max? Why does the floating point colour value have no space that it floats in (as it says in the help file).

3ds Max does not append any color-space information to rendered output. If necessary, you can apply a color space such as sRGB to output images in an image-editing program like Adobe Photoshop.

So when I import the .exr into photoshop it asks me: what is the colour space of the imported image and do you want to convert it to the working colour space?
So how do I answer it?

[Deflaminis]

From what I understand, it's not so much gamma 2.2 as it is sRGB, which is close enough to 2.2 that people use them both interchangeably. The adobe profile that matches this is sRGB IEC61966-2.1

You can just set photoshop to "preserve embedded profiles" on CC (and likely cs5/6) under Edit->Color Settings->Color Management Policies->RGB if you are saving out exr's, and it goes without saying that you should use the vray frame buffer. For sure that'll save out sRGB, the max frame buffer might save out only 2.2 gamma, which is a bit different. I say might because I'm not sure about it, but I do know there are some drawbacks to color and the max frame buffer.

[RockinAkin]

SO what is the output of V-ray max? Why does the floating point colour value have no space that it floats in (as it says in the help file).

It depends entirely on what format you output in. If you're outputting a floating-point format like EXR, color space is irrelevant since the format can contain color values far beyond the primaries of any defined color space - including negative values.

[rajdarge]

so I output to a .vrimg. Then I convert that to an 32 bit .exr with the utility. I then drag and drop the .exr in photoshop cc 2014
The first question it asks is "treat alpha as transparency or alpha channel?"
Then next question (because I work in Adobe RGB) is "what is the colour-space for this image, and after assigning it, should I convert it to working colour-space"
I am paraphrasing a little.
The default is sRGB. So I chose that .
SInce I work in Adobe RGB (because that was what I was told to do by my Photography mentor - I did try Profoto RGB and I got all kinds of banding problems). Is what I am doing "correct", and is there a way of working completely in adobe RGB for consistency. If what I am doing is "wrong" what should I be doing.
THere is no end of bullshit out there in the photography world on this topic. Its difficult to work out what is real and what is someone's fantasy.

I am also probably going to buy a wide gamut monitor and what should my response be to these sorts of questions then ?