Hello,
I would like to share a few updates on my end. As a personal exercise for myself, I have developed a LMT for ACES 1.3. It is available for free on my Git with an OCIO config.
My main goal was to develop a pleasing and natural look for ACES 1.3 by tweaking purity, brilliance and hue shifts:
- Reduce overall contrast of ACES 1.X
- Avoid clipping as much as possible to ensure “smooth” gradients
- Adjust the “hue-path bendings” to untangle the skews
- Improve purity attenuation to avoid passing g0 threshold
I was overall pleased with the result and I thought that maybe such an LMT would be useful for CG students or freelance colorists as a starting point. I have put all my love for beautiful pictures and movies in this LMT, although I would easily admit it is far from perfect.
To perform this look development as best as I could, I looked at hundreds of images (both live-action and CG) and compared against several picture formations to avoid visual adaptation.
A bit like the ARRI Film Lab (where they mention that “the grain profiles were not designed to perfectly emulate a specific stock but instead represent a look that is characteristic of many different styles of stocks […]”), I have put a bit of all the picture formations that I like in this LMT (JP2499, openDRT, High Contrast Venice 2 LUT from Picture Shop…).
Here are some visual examples (ACES 1.3 with RGC and ACES 1.3 with my LMT) :
I would love to get some feedback about the LMT if possible. If you want to use it in Resolve, it needs to be applied on “Tlog_Egamut2”. I could not find a proper shaper space within the ACES family (happy to also hear some thoughts about this).
I think my next step is to try the same exercise for ACES 2.0, although I can already share that I struggled much more than ACES 1.X on my preliminary tests. Could it be because ACES 1.X is at its core a “simple” Matrix 3x3 and an s-curve (per-channel/RGB tonescale) when ACES 2.0 is a much more complex model (CAM and such) ? I would love to hear from anyone who had experience with this.
Biggest issues I faced so far were in the blues:
I will share updates on this LMT as soon as I can. Thanks !