Colour · the pipe
Colour space is which numbers mean which colour.
A node changes the picture. Colour management says what the picture is, from the camera file to the screen in the hall. Lose the chain and a red lehenga is no longer the red you shot.
Wide gamut
DaVinci Wide Gamut, or ACES, is larger than the screen. The lehenga red and the marigold yellow still exist in here. Grade in this space. Do not grade inside Rec.709 and hope the clipped red comes back.
Where the red sits
A schematic, not a measured chart. The camera’s gamut is larger than Rec.709. A lehenga can be outside the television and still inside the file. The output transform has to bring it in. A hard clip just cuts it.
Three ways the pipe breaks
01
Log, read as Rec.709
The file looks flat and grey-green, so contrast and saturation get piled on. That is not a look. It is a guess at the transform you skipped, and the reds twist while you guess.
02
The transform, twice
Project colour management is already converting to Rec.709, and a Rec.709 LUT is doing it again. The picture crushes and the dress goes electric. Use the managed pipe, or a manual LUT pipe. Not both.
03
Full range into a video player
The master was written as full range and the player expects video levels, or the reverse. Blacks lift or crush on YouTube and nowhere else. Pick one range, tag it, and watch the file in the player the family will use.
The desk
- One input transform for each camera, named for the log you shot.
- One working space for the day. Wide gamut. The look lives here, as nodes.
- One output. Rec.709, gamma 2.4, for the master the hall and the web both take.
- Do not add a second Rec.709 LUT on top of that output.