ACES & Photoshop friendly workflows

Thanks @TooDee. I’m aware the images can be pre-converted via Nuke (this is actually our current workflow). The target audience here is Photoshop users with limited access or working knowledge of Nuke or other DCCs, so the goal is to reduce our dependency on other toolsets and keep as many conversion steps as possible confined to the domain of PS. It’s a given that matte painters will be working in 16-bit mode (I applaud @alexfry for leading the charge on adoption of 32-bit float/linear paint workflows, but sadly we’ve found PS not up to the task). Given that changing modes from 32-bit down 16-bit will force PS users into the HDR tone mapping dialog, this feels like an opportune place to present a preset that will convert to the appropriate working color spaces (e.g. ACEScct). That is, assuming this is within the realm of HDR tone mappings capabilities; I have my doubts about any conversion that implies a transformation on the primaries (e.g. P0->P1), but otherwise a transformation from ACEScg to ACEScct could be accomplished with a 1D lookup. Has anybody had any success piggybacking on PS’ native color transform operations to accomplish what I’ve described?

I hope PS will be supporting OCIO v2 soon and then it should be a lot easier for everyone.

Do you mean natively? The OCIO plug-in for photoshop does support v2.0

It sounds like natively to me, at least I was hoping for it.

Adobe
Adobe is currently working to implement an ACES workflow inside an OpenColor IO v2 wrapper for its tools most often used in production pipelines: Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere Pro. Lars Borg, a SMPTE Fellow and one of the developers of ACES, is a core leader in Adobe’s color team who is leading the charge. His colleague Patrick Palmer, Principal Product Manager for Professional Video, notes that the ability to support ACES in OCIO v2 without a 3D LUT is a significant step forward to driving broad-scale support for ACES, and that the improved GPU renderer in OCIO v2 is a critical area that will drive adoption.
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Native OCIO support in Photoshop would be a major step in the right direction, although there’s no mention of a timeline in the press release, so this could still be a ways off. In the context of existing available feature sets, I’m still curious if HDR tone mapping offers any hope?

@TooDee thanks, agreed!

@nico.vandenbosch have you tried the colorspace conversion tool in the Photoshop OCIO plugin? if you are wanting to stay inside photoshop that might give you what you need.

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As far as I’m aware HDR tonemapping is just a tool designed for photography with artistic controls to map to SDR. There is no way to have it in a setting that will convert ACEScg to ACEScct or any other inversible log format.

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@Derek I’ve avoided the OCIO plugin up until now since I’ve read mixed reviews on the stability of it. Plus, deploying (and potentially compiling) a plugin remotely to multiple users is a bit more fraught than a simple curve file. That being said, I’m not opposed to evaluating it to see if it meets our needs. Thanks

I want to do it the way you tell me, but I can’t see this part in Photoshop, so how do I create an icc file? Or where do I download it?