Just asking as a sanity check here. I’ve been sticking to 2024 and also to legacy gamma workflow for the longest time, and I’m upgrading now for a new project. No 2027 for a while for safety and also there’s no Corona yet.
Anyway, with a vanilla out of the box 3ds Max and Corona, you get the error message that says:
“Frame buffer uses view transform set in Color Management settings. Using ACES OT with a view transform may lead to incorrect result”
Is it just me or is it not odd that the default in Max and Corona don’t have defaults that match? I understand that maybe the message is meant more as a heads up. But it looks like an error. Imagine someone told you that 3ds Max and Corona are great, and you go and buy them, install and the first thing you get is this? That doesn’t feel like a great user experience to me.
And even if I change the view-transform for the VFB to ‘un-tone-mapped’ I still get this message. Can’t Corona do a check if OCIO is on, and in that case if the VFB is tonedmapped?
Un-tone-mapped is still some transformation, if you put Frame Buffer to Raw, you will get no ACES OT warning.
This was due to the fact that ACES workflow (whatever that meant at that point) was quite requested, and we introduced ACES OT before 3ds Max got Color Management.
Hence, ACES OT is there until gradually it will be removed when more and more users will start using Color managed workflow (it is still a very small fraction of Corona users I believe).
While it makes perfect sense to not include (or have it disabled) ACES OT in default tone mapping stack if Color Management is used, it is quite hacky to do this for all cases (3ds Max defaults, Corona defaults, consider both Gamma and Color Managed workflow etc.) and still keep things consistent/logical for future improvements, we don’t think it is worth the effort. In fact, it is another “warning” or notice for users who want to get known with color managed workflow to learn and understand things better. More advanced users can of course ignore it (or disable and delete).
Thank you for your reply! Coming from colour management in Photoshop, this stuff is quite complicated and it’s really easy to make mistakes or miss something. All I really wish for is for my display profile to be taken into account so that when I look at the vfb and then save out to a tiff and open i Photoshop, there is no difference. For now I’ve settled on using the predefined adobeRGB or P3 as I can set my monitor to those instead of it’s native color space.
So in Max color management ‘SDR 1.0 SDR-video’ is similar to having ACES OT on in a legacy/gamma workflow?
And un-tonemapped doesn’t apply any highlight compression and contrast, it just takes it from raw or linear to what? to sRGB or my chosen display profile?
And raw is just completely linear gamma 1.0? That one saves out if you plan on compositing it later?
I get it, and Color management, even with ACES2.0, still has limitations and is far from being quick-startable thing. Hopefully this will improve on both user education and software side.