Compositing part 2 Color spaces, LUTs, ACES in Blender EP37b

Color spaces, luts, ACES, what you need to know before you start compositing.
Link:
Link is a fictional character and the protagonist of Nintendo's video game series The Legend of Zelda. He is the mascot of the franchise and one of Nintendo's main icons. He was created by Japanese video game designer Shigeru Miyamoto. Link was introduced as the hero of the original 1986 The Legend of Zelda video game and has appeared in a total of 19 entries in the series, as well as a number of spin-offs. He also features in other Nintendo media, including merchandise, comic books and an animated television series.
LUTs in Blender:
blendermarket....
Filmic in Nuke:
www.maximeroz....
ACES in Blender:
• Setup ACES in Blender
Color chart:
colectiacostica...

[@simonmoore8776]

This is the best explanation i've seen of colour spaces and how to work with ACES in Blender. Thank you.

[@WillGibbons]

Good job condensing a TON of information into a short video. These are topics that can make a beginner's head spin, but concepts you pick up after working in a production environment for quite a while. I can appreciate how much energy it takes to create an informative video like this.

[@pauljamesvfx]

my favorite blender channel .You are the GOAT bob

[@_sagefire]

You only need to delete the Render Layers node, you can still use the Composite node so that you can view the image output in the render view at 17:40 As for performance, it's something they are looking to tackle in 2022 after the Eevee rewrite. So, hopefully that situation will change soon. That said, showing the limitations of Blender relative to software like Nuke is a great thing as exposing limitations helps in determining what features need added (or what workflows might need better documented or get a UX pass)

[@blenderguru]

*Troy Sobotka has aggressively entered the chat*

[@BlenderBob]

You are the second one who talks to me about Troy Sobotka. Who is he? On IMDB, he’s a grip, not a CG artist. Maybe it’s someone else. What am I missing here?

[@jowiemonster]

@@BlenderBob troy is the person who created filmic and filmic was made to be ACIS compatible.

[@BlenderBob]

@@jowiemonster Good to know, thanks!

[@nicholascureton933]

😅

[@ChrisKhaled83]

@blenderguru OH PLEASE NO !!!

[@smartmoney2503]

You Are The Best Blender Bob!!!!! Cgi is easily Understandable when you explain it ❤❤❤

[@MrBlendercross]

Thx you spending so much time to explain this stuff from the base .....

[@MrCshx]

Priceless info. Thanks a lot, sir.

[@Maskl1n]

BIG thank you for your time and effort!

[@philipprapp9356]

Bob where have you been all my life! So many valuable informations in one channel. Thank you!

[@minhaj_khan]

This is exactly what I wanted to know. Thanks, Bob!

[@MrZabu365]

Man thank you!!! I was getting crazy....

[@damian_madmansnest]

OMG I can’t express how good this series is!

[@3d-illusions]

There's a convert colourspace node in Blender now by the way, so you can bring in aces in the compositor, then convert it to linear, then when you've finished compositing you can convert back to linear CG so that it get's saved into the EXR correctly.

[@BeratTurkbkmaz]

Thanks to these videos, Blender will be used in many, many more studios. It's already the main 3d application in our studio. But we use nuke and AE for compositing. I think Blender needs to deal with a lot more than going into this area.

[@nothingnothing3211]

Why AE when you already are using Nuke?

[@BeratTurkbkmaz]

​@@nothingnothing3211 Because Nuke is so expensive. Actually we use Nuke for some hero shots with couple of seniors. I know looks weird but unfortunately budgets is that in Turkey

[@migovas1483]

@@nothingnothing3211 Sometimes you can do stuff easier in AE, than Nuke /Fusion, , specially if you are dealing with Motion Graphics, and you have to zoom in in vectors and need to combine stuff with pre existent AE templates . it happens

[@parpelstudios7]

Maybe Im misunderstood. Yes blender doesn't come natively with the Aces color space but you can download and install it. Than again, im a cartoonist and don't need all that complication in my workflow.

[@tobinloveday]

Great video, thanks for uploading!

[@WeareVRMUSIC]

Very helpful! Thank you!

[@havok373]

Keep going! love this class!

[@soloplayer8664]

Thanks Master! Not related but your place looks very comfy

[@vrSpeechless]

Informative, and entertaining as always! Now I finally have a solid reason to buy a UHD TV. Did not know that along with the higher resolution, they also offer a wider color gamut.

[@FalconWingz88]

the compositing company im working at, uses blackmagic fusion. it's very capable of compositing. my supervisor uses nuke, and says nuke is still better. But considering the price, fusion is a wayy better choice. fusion is like 80 to 90% of nuke, and in the future when blackmagic focuses their team on building fusion , i have a feeling fusion will be better than nuke. (not in a short time though). also, fusion has alot of plugins, and have a nicer UI in my opinion.

[@Vassay]

I'd say 90-95%, and Fusion has WAY better 3d space and tools. No option to plug in Octane like in Nuke, though =)

[@Dive_Me_Crazy]

I found Fusion a little hard to get my head around, where as NUKE seemed more polished and intuitive. But I agree, when Blackmagic gets more focused on Fusion it will be vastly improved - hopefully they will keep the price low.

[@Vassay]

@@Dive_Me_Crazy Ease of use comes down to practice. Both programs are sufficiently easy and clunky at the same time =)

[@ZekeFaust]

Fusion is an excellent software, an industry standard back in the day before Eyeon went through all its financial trouble and before the foundry got its stranglehold on the industry. Fusion's 3D system and particles are indeed much more robust than nuke (they haven't been updated in years, so imagine how good they were at the time). It's primed for a comeback with blackmagic putting more resources into it and it getting more users since its integration into Resolve.

[@matejivi]

Thanks!

[@SamBacket]

ACES and ACESsg color space converter was added in blender 3.2

[@BlenderBob]

Yeah, well, not the same thing. Blender is still not really ACES compliant.

[@retroeshop1681]

The 15:29 statement summarizes exactly my thoughts in that precise moment, Blender Bob, you are a mind reader, this is WAAAAAAAY more complicated than I excepted, I only understood like 50% or less of all the info, but at least now I know what the hell is going on, and if I ever work in a production I will at least know what are they talking about hehe

[@Dive_Me_Crazy]

Thanks heaps for this. I downloaded the "free" version of NUKE and I actually like it. Its a lot easier that Fusion to get your head around and around a lot more. Pity the full version of NUKE is so expensive. This introduction is really good to have. Plugin in a node or two is easy but the idea and theory behind what you are doing is actually the really meaty bit.

[@Meteotrance]

I try filmic log with dpx export, it's realy aces friendly when you use aces color profile and the log mod of dpx, it reconise as a film scan.

[@BlenderBob]

But DPX doesn't support AOVs though

[@Meteotrance]

@@BlenderBob that's right, i wish there was an ACEScg Filmic preset inside Blender to solve that, it's funny cause we can import texture made in ACES inside blender without adding the aces color profile, they realy need to improve this.

[@bankitamas]

If you want to use ACES in Blender then I suggest you set the "color_picking" role in the OCIO config file to "ACES - ACEScg". If you do it, then the color picker will work correctly!

[@atwright147]

Terrific videos :)

[@FireAngelOfLondon]

LUT stands for Look Up Table. Occasionally you may see it as CLUT which is Colour Look Up Table.

[@kokoze]

11:46 yep a lot of things update when they shouldn't it blender. It isn't exclusive to the shader editor. I hope it gets fixed in the future because it makes large scenes very slow.

[@MalmqvistM]

From watching Blender Today I gather they are working on stuff like that.

[@jowiemonster]

Blender has a separate import mode for image sequences if you go to add(shift+A) > image sequences . blender will import the sequence correctly.

[@BlenderBob]

All right thanks. But it shouldn't be that hard to change the code for detecting sequences automatically

[@AdrianoOliveiraUFC]

Bob, nice work, but there is some misconceptions about color space. For instance, Filmic is not a CS, it is a very sofisticated OpenColorIO configuration to transform linear 32 bit render data into a display oriented image by compressing the latitude with an analogic film like look. It is similar to shoting in Slog3 in a Sony camera. Blender renders within sRGB primaries, so Filmic produces sRGB results. As an OpenColorIO script, it can be used in any OpenColorIO compatible software, like Nuke or Fusion.

[@BlenderBob]

Thanks for the clarification. :-)

[@orangepee4352]

Hi blender bob sorry for the unrelated question but I’m working on a large scale forest at the moment and I wanted to know how many different models I should use for each species of tree to make it not look repeated. I remember you talking about this subject before and it think you said something like 7 models but I forgot which video it was, thank you

[@BlenderBob]

7 is enough

[@orangepee4352]

@@BlenderBob thanks so much for the quick response. love your videos:)

[@gamingneeded1902]

6:12 your link is in another castle... wait wrong game EDIT: link was found and rescued by zelda

[@charlesweaver3000]

All your hyrule castle are belong to us!

[@GaryParris]

as far as i understand it, filmic in blender is the Aces colour standard. filmic in photography is raw where the contrast is 12+ stops of light, in blender i believe using filmic its 20+ stops of light.

[@BlenderBob]

Filmic is a transform, a LUT. ACES is a colorspace.

[@GaryParris]

@@BlenderBob let's just say I did a very good job of confusing the issue lol but yes as you showed, they say tweaking the rec709 and d65 using open io colour and exporting as openEXR to a colour grading software is key. Hmmm didn't read that properly before now, my bad!

[@controllo2316]

Hi I have always had a doubt that I installed aces in blender but I would lose my SRGB window view and then I downloaded the ocio from the internet and installed it only aces and although I have retained the srgb but I am in nuke and ae It is impossible to restore the original srgb data in it. May I ask why this is why blender's aces feel a little complicated? I look forward to your answer, thank you😭

[@BlenderBob]

ACES in Blender is a hack and you do run into issues with the color picker and viewing you renders in Blender but once you are in Nuke, there’s nothing stopping you from outputting sRGB

[@Jaboli86]

Hey Bob, great video, as always! One thing, if I may, and correct me if I'm wrong, but, isn't it that EXR files are linear (no colour mapping)? Thus they don't save what filmic does to the render, but they neither save what "standard" setting does? As around 9:15 you say that when saving EXR from Blender you get the same image as when using standard view transform, which is never the case for me. I use Fusion, and working with EXR files I need to go from linear to log (and have pretty nice control over that process using cineonlog node BTW). So, maybe NUKE just applies some colour setting right of the bat when importing EXR files, and the settings are similar to what Blender does with standard view transform? Just wondering, as I'm not a NUKE user, so can't tell. Working with Blender and Fusion though, I use filmic for previews, and lighting, as the standard setting is soooooo baaaaad (especially when it comes to realistic lighting for an interior scene). Would never recommend lighting with standard view transform setting just because you render to EXR. Then after importing the image to Fusion, I get a nice starting point, which can easily be made similar looking to filmic (or better, and fine tuned). What are your thoughts on that?

[@BlenderBob]

Yeah, standard is hell but it's pointless to use filming if the results don't match at all in Nuke. So either you do a soft clip like I've shown or you use Filmic for Nuke.

[@Jaboli86]

​@@BlenderBob As I said, no idea what Nuke does to the image... Was just refering to the EXR being linear, and not really like standard view transform. So I'm surprised you get results similar to "standard" after importing linear EXR to Nuke. If I remember correctly (I may not), Blender's "standard" clips values the hard way. So after some point, no way to tell when you should stop adding more light to the scene. It's not good at all to work with standard IMHO. If I was using standard as a preview in interior scenes, they'd probably be not lit enough, or properly, or easily (I'd try to avoid burning the image at all) That's why I use filmic (that does actual mapping) - even if the results aren't identical later in Fusion. Regarding final looks, I do rely heavily on post anyways, so no biggie here :-) BTW, after you soft clip your image in NUKE, it's not the same as "standard" view transform in Blender... It's looking more like filmic, not identical, but still... very similar process to mine. Apart from what each of us sees when lighting the scene. Don't want to argue here at all, don't get me wrong. You have tons more experience than me, but from my point of view, it's pointless to work with standard at all, even when using EXR's, that's why this part of the video bugged me so much :-) That said, I'm always eagerly anticipating new videos from you, and thank you for making them!

[@JKierbel]

@@Jaboli86 You're correct, exr exports linear files for their transfer function (bypassing all color-management transforms and saving the raw radiometric "Linear 709" data since that's Blender's rendering-space). They look the same in Nuke as in "Blender with Standard" because both softwares know the incoming data is linear and Nuke applies an sRGB view-transform on it by default, like Blender on "Standard".

[@superkaboose1066]

love your stuff, don't burn yourself out though haha

[@TheSamucacs]

Blender 2.79 used to have different color spaces, including camera models

[@deylightmedia3266]

aaand you are sounding like my dad in his electronics lab hehe

[@fffffooooxxxx]

I think you meant the RAW Data are saved in EXR, not Standard?

[@naq_montages]

2:19 😂😂😂

[@dyfx9788]

I cant find the link in the description :(

[@BlenderBob]

Oops! Fixed! Thanks

[@piotrus3333_CGI]

(9:40) filmic is just a tone mapping - not a color space.

[@stephanechataignie]

OMG c'est tellement compliqué pour nous autres simples humains 😲

[@PowerfullUs]

There is no link in the description =(

[@BlenderBob]

Fixed. Thanks.

[@A_Train]

So funny that you are complaining about playback and refresh rates as you scrub through the timeline. Blender is for compositing like Nuke is for modeling. At least Blender has the pipeline.