There has been a very interesting conversation on slack and I thought it would be worth doing a summary on acescentral.
@Thomas_Mansencal :
my only point is that removing hue shifts as a default is not desirable because of the arguments Alex Forsythe brought up and the simple fact it would change the look massively. […] Reminded me Alex Fry GDC presentation from 2017 where he explained that he was adamant about removing them but it did not worked for all cases, quite the opposite!
Which @Troy_James_Sobotka replied :
Optionally, I think the point is being missed.
- The display can’t represent the colour of the flame, so it skews.
- It is possible, if one were so inclined, to add a saturation adjustment to return more of the “yellowish” flame.
- It is impossible to remove the saturation surface of the image once the skews are introduced.
[…] But again, the crux of this discussion is essentially about why bother with colour science at all if it never comes out of the display?
The conservation followed like this with @Thomas_Mansencal explaining :
Without entering into subjective discussions, changing something like the default tonescale contrast has much less impact than making the tonescale hue preserving. So making the latter change a default in a new ACES rendering transform has much deeper consequences, so I don’t think it is a good idea, it should be optional. If you have built a ton of assets under the current rendering transform and you end up in a situation where the new one forces you to rebalance all of them, it is not a great change. […] Not saying there is no problem, just saying that the medecine should not be the nuclear option.
@daniele then added :
If the skew is part of the Display Rendering it needs to do the same skew for all deliverable. In fact your cg assets will look completely different in HDR under current transforms. […] Well the starting point should be same appearance , I guess.
Which Thomas replied :
They will (look different) and it is acknowledged, entirely depends on the deliverables. And the client might also either be fine with a different look on HDR but even request for it. […] Just look at the Haywire trailer by Steven Soderbergh… Not saying that I like it, but the client pays the bills here and he is certainly pushing for that look. I don’t know if the appearance should be the same with vastly different class of displays: are clients expecting that the appearance of a 100nits, 10000nits and the real world appearance are the same? It is a fundamental question to which I have no answers. Say I’m paying extra bucks to go to HDR cinema, what is the point to get there if things look the same than SDR exhibition ? That is the type of questions producers ask themselves.
Then Daniele explained :
I am not saying HDR and SDR should be identical. But a yellow candle in SDR should not be orange in HDR I guess. At least I know many colourists which are confused when that happens.
To which Thomas replied :
I certainly could see that happening but all your pyro effects turning red/white under a hue-preserving rendering transform is equally bad, and it does not affect a single person but hundreds of people. All of sudden, all your Lookdev, FX, Lighting & Rendering teams are affected. Sometimes, broken by force of adoption is what is correct, but we are entering philosophical discussions here. And again, what feels broken for you might be a feature or the expected behaviour for others. […] I can certainly point at the dangers of changing the rendering transform in such a dramatic way that it preserves hues. […] Changes to a a large system like ACES must be incremental, you just can’t modify something as critical as the RRT without triggering a storm, instead you should give people the option to change their workflow, at their will and gradually. Happy to be corrected but it seems like the only sane thing to do to avoid having an angry mob knocking at the Academy’s door!
Jed entered the conversation :
2.0 seems like a good version to make a change to the default display rendering transform. I’m not sure there would be an angry mob if it looked better than the current version. I think a lot there are a lot of people especially in vfx who use aces because it is easy and off the shelf, who think that it is a “neutral” view transform, and are trusting it to represent their asset work faithfully, and they do not realise what is happening to the color that they are so careful to create faithfully once it goes through the view transform to the display. Certainly a chromaticity preserving rendering method is not the easiest path forward, but I do not think an approach should be discarded because it is difficult or inconvenient. As professional image makers we should be able to make intentional decisions about the appearance of color, to have control over what is happening. I think there is benefit in the approach of trying to pull apart the reasons why certain things are happening, why we are seeing certain artifacts. It is very difficult to break down problems like this because there are so many factors at play. But I think if we try to isolate problem areas maybe there are solutions we haven’t thought of.
And Daniele suggested :
You can make a LMT to match ACES 1.0?
@nick also shared his thoughts :
If we offer a few options out of the box, then I think the default should feel close to what we have now, to keep the people who already use ACES comfortable. But we could have a hue preserving alternate, and maybe people would gradually move over. Then we can deprecate it in 3.0.
A big question brough up by Thomas and Troy was about objectivity :
The problem is that looking better is highly subjective and any large DRT change has potentially a large cost.
I can’t help but find this “highly subjective” line of discourse completely quite disturbing. What’s our ground truth? We have a working space. We have values. We are not displaying them. At all. Not even remotely.
Interestingly enough it looks like the famous K1S1 DRT is not hue-preserving.
Then @sdyer entered the conversation :
[…] all options are on the table - if they meet the requirements. Which we are trying to define. everyone here seems to be acting like decisions have already been made. Can we focus on defining absolute requirements and then maybe even things that “would be nice to have” (if we can get them without breaking other stuff)?
We then agreed that we would need to see examples of chromaticity preserving tone scale sounds great, makes great plots, looks great on some images and absolutely horrible on others to better understand what happened for the creation of ACES 1.0.
I also tried to give my tuppence :
Keeping skews for a major release doesn’t sound right to me. For a major release, we should not be shy of changing stuff. This is the moment to do things “right” or “better”… Not 3.0. By definition, a major change means stuff will change and eventually break.
Which Scott replied to :
I can tell you I am 100% in favor of changing stuff, even drastically, IF it fixes the things we consider broken and still delivers on the other things we want it to keep doing. The requirements define the solution. so figure out what it must do and then we can focus our efforts on making something that does. We can’t sell a big change jsut for the sake of changing things. But if we can show the many ways on which it improves known issues with v1, we will have a lot easier time convincing the stalwarts to change and the holdouts to revisit it.
Finally Daniele shared some thoughts :
I still have difficulties to accept the “cg assets” argument. If the assets are so fragile to the DRT in use how do they survive a normal grading session. All the cg and VFX elements I got my hands on work very well with different DRTs and looks. They look different, but so does all the live action too. […] In a way a cleaner DRT should actually help to produce neutral assets.
Final words from thomas about CG issues :
Not all assets are equally fragile, pyro elements certainly would be. You have a whole class of people using pre-rendered texture sheets and such in games. And they tweak the look through the DRT directly.
I have tried to reproduce this conversation in the most faithful way. If you think I haven’t done a good job, please let me know and I will modify/delete the post. But I thought it would be important to share with everyone on acescentral.
- Should the new Output Transforms be hue-preserving ?
- Should there be a default behaviour and then an optional one ?
- Do we want a smooth transition or a fresh start ?
- Should we consult (again) with studios/people using ACES to see what they think ?
Regards,
Chris