I feel that in certain situations my highlights in materials are too white and desaturated. And in trying to replicate products shot with very high end cameras, I feel I’m falling short.
Playing around with acesOT, reinhard and advanced filmic some things can be done, but highlights still look grayish and lifeless compared to whatever “colour science”, tonemapping and LUTs happen inside of phase ones and hasselblads or just plain old canon or nikons.
Anyone have any suggestions for how to do tone mapping better in Max and Corona or should one render out as a linear 32-bit and try to do the tone-mapping outside?
First, visual references and some examples (what you want & what you got going - always ‘a must’
Then, forget ACES OT (along clamping raw data, it also desaturates colors), so rather turn to using LUTs on full HDRIs (ie. Kodak’s Film Type SO-368 (Ektachrome) that was extensively used by NASA, NatGeo and product photography back in the days.) And which you can still fine tune using color curves.
About specific 3rd party tone mapping tools, rather get familiar with different models (check and study their papers first). Just to satisfy some curiosity, I find "Photoreceptor the closest to ‘natural vision’, while “Bilateral” exhibits more pronunciation and control over the saturation/vibrance side of the color spectrum. After, simply see which tools or add-ons have those models integrated.
Finally, understand the psychological side of human vision/perception, since depending on the composition/imposition of certain colors makes us perceive saturation differently (“Interaction of Colors”, Albers, Josef (1971))
