Research & Development

Color Spaces and You

Posted on Oct 23, 2009, 4:00 am
A basic introduction to the concept of a colorspace for artists, programmers, and anyone who's just curious about the meaning of terms like "sRGB, "gamma," and "color profile." Talks about where colorspaces come from, what they look like, and why you might need to think about them.
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meshula
meshula Oct 24, 2009, 11:24 pm
Great presentation, I quite enjoyed it! If you're interested in how we deal with how we keep colors consistent in a film production pipeline: http://www.openexr.com/OpenEXRColorManagement.pdf
rapso
rapso Oct 26, 2009, 1:06 pm
sorry for beeing a smartarse, but I think on page 35 you show a comparision of 8bit vs 2 bit and not 4bit like the label says. but the rest was just perfect, as all your R&D paper, thx ;)
andrewd
andrewd Oct 27, 2009, 2:35 am
meshula -- thanks for taking a look, and thanks for the paper. I was in the film industry for a (long) while myself and can appreciate the complexity of the color pipeline. Our needs in games are a little simpler, of course :-)

rapso -- thanks for the heads up. Yes, that's a strange image. It is actually a 4-bit gradient split into four bands; four bands imply 2-bit color, though, so it's a bit confusing. But If you look closely, you can see the gradient in each band.

The conversion to PDF probably didn't help matters, though ironically, that is -- in and of itself -- another color space transform...
FieldsOfCarp
FieldsOfCarp Dec 14, 2009, 11:11 am
Excellent treatment of the theory. Is it possible to discuss more practical problems and solutions next?

For example, there are quite a few different ways rendering pipelines can implement colour space correction (with both 32bit and 64bit targets). Implementing it in way that it would be portable (cross platform) and transparent to artists is quite a challenging task, I find. It would be interesting to see a talk on that :)

Also, methods to practically enforce/educate non tech people. My experience is that artists switch off the second we mention "gamma" or "colourspace". Programmers are easy to get on board but that's not enough.

Finally, there comes a point when the engineering overhead is so much (if you work cross platform) it becomes a burden that needs justification beyond the "it's just better/propper maths". Artists tend to be used to the old/incorrect behaviour of blending and lighting in sRGB space so their immediate reaction is always "this is wrong". DCC tools being less than perfect in this field doesnt help either.

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