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CHAPTER 1: COLOR
MANAGEMENT

! chrisbrejon - " March 10, 2020 -

# CG Cinematography

Table Of Contents

Introduction

The first and most

important decision

Introductory Quote

Optical Illusions

Human Visual System (HVS)

The human eye

The mantis shrimp eye

The human brain

What is light ?

From Light to Colour

The CIE Chromaticity

Diagrams from 1931 and 1976

Chromaticity or Color ?

RGB Color space and its

components

Primaries

Primaries
comparison

Whitepoint

Transfer functions
(OETF and EOTF)

Common mistakes

Properties of a color space

Image State

Scene-referred

Display-referred

Viewing environment

Industry Standards

Rendering and Display

spaces

What is sRGB ?

Scene-Linear workflow

Display EOTF : is it “up”

or “down” ?

OETF and EOTF : a no-

operation ?

Display Linear

Example of scene-linear
rendering space

“Linear” confusion

Scene-linear
confusion

Display-linear
confusion

Tone mapping

Lookup table (LUT)

LUT description

OCIO (OpenColorIO)

Look development and

LUTs

1D LUT example

Filmic look

Format

Range

Summary

Conclusion

Sources

Daniele Siragusano’s

Recommended sources for

beginners

Videos about the red colour

Articles and blogs

INTRODUCTION

You cannot talk about Cinematography

without addressing the question of Color
Management. It is essential to know within
which color space you are working and
what is your display target. Chapter 1 and
1.5 are the only technical chapters of the
book. We will focus on the artistic side in
the next chapters. Don’t be scared !

Sure, you could work in full sRGB with no

LUT and still get a decent result… But,
let’s no go down that path.

Yes, color management is a pain in the arse,

but it will give you strong foundations to
build a proper lighting later on. Lighting in
computer graphics is so connected to
technology that a good understanding of
these concepts is important.

There are some good introductory courses

out there such as Cinematic Color, but it is
always a bit frustrating for me to get lost in
mathematic formulas at page 9 ! So I have
tried to keep this chapter as simple and
artist-friendly as I could. Thanks for reading
!

If you don’t feel like starting by a

technical chapter, I don’t blame you. You
can skip directly to chapter 2.

— But maybe it is worth the effort…

The first and most important

decision

Based on my experience, the choice of a

Color Management Workflow (CMW) is the
first decision to make when you start a
project. Because, every single artistic
decision will be based on this choice :

Albedo values
Lights’ exposures
Look development (texturing and
surfacing)

The trailer below is an example of

thousands of hours of hard work by
hundreds of artists that got wasted by
wrong color management. Look at the lava,
it is clamped !

Wonder Park (2019) - Ne…

Introductory Quote

Some of my data comes from this article by

Thomas Mansencal. As it is a bit technical, I
have tried to simplify it for readers who are
not familiar with this topic. Let’s start with
this great quote from Mark D. Fairchild :

“Why should it be particularly difficult to

agree upon consistent terminology in the
field of color appearance ? Perhaps the
answer lies in the very nature of the
subject. Almost everyone knows what
color is. After all, they have had firsthand
experience of it since shortly after birth.
However, very few can precisely describe
their color experiences or even precisely
define color.”

OPTICAL ILLUSIONS

There are three things to take in account

when we talk about color :

The eye
The brain
The subject

Here are a few examples that will show you

that our brain can be easily tricked and that
we should speak about color with humility.

You can find plenty of optical illusions on

internet, like our last example : is the dress
blue or white ?

— The Dress has also been studied by scientists !

HUMAN VISUAL SYSTEM

(HVS)

The human eye

First thing to know is that the human eye is

an incredibly complex and advanced
technology. We are poorly trying to
replicate its reconstruction process with
cameras and screens. How does it work ?

I have copied most of this text from the

websites linked above.

The cornea is the clear, transparent front

covering which admits light. Its refractive
power bends the light rays in such a way
that they pass freely through the pupil.
The pupil is the opening in the center of
the iris and works like a shutter in a
camera. It is an adjustable opening that
controls the intensity of light permitted
to strike the crystalline lens. It has the
ability to enlarge and shrink, depending
on how much light is entering the eye.

After passing through the iris, the light

rays pass thru the eye’s natural
crystalline lens. This clear, flexible
structure works like the lens in a
camera, shortening and lengthening its
width in order to focus light rays properly.
The crystalline lens focuses light through
the vitreous humor, a dense, transparent
gel-like substance, that fills the globe of
the eyeball and supports the retina.

The retina functions much like the film

in a camera. It receives the image that
the cornea focuses through the eye’s
internal lens and transforms this image
into electrical impulses that are carried
by the optic nerve to the brain. Retinas
are made of photoreceptors, which come
in two kinds : rods and cones.

— We will come back to rods and cones later.

The mantis shrimp eye

I thought it was interesting to discuss the

human eye with the creator of Guerilla
Render, Benjamin Legros, who actually
explained to me : our eyes actually only see
in red, green and blue. They are crap !

Nothing compared to the mantis shrimp.

Here are some pretty amazing eyes : they
have twelve photoreceptors, when humans
only have three ! It can even see UV and
Infrared, like the Predator ! I really liked this
original take on our trichromatic system.

Mantis shrimp is a reference for color

scientists.

Mantis shrimps, or stomatopods, are

marine crustaceans of
the order Stomatopoda. They are among
the most important predators in many
shallow, tropical and subtropical marine
habitats. However, despite being
common, they are poorly understood, as
many species spend most of their lives
tucked away in burrows and holes.

The human brain

Our brain has also an important part in our

Visual System. It is responsible for
managing all this data. When the image hits
the retina, it is actually upside down. The
brain put its back correctly :

What we really see is our mind’s

reconstruction of objects based on input
provided by the eyes, not the actual light
received by our eyes.

— From this article.

WHAT IS LIGHT ?

To define color, you must first define light

because no color is perceptible without
light.

Light is a type of energy.

Light energy travels in waves.

Some light travels in short, “choppy”

waves. Other light travels in long, lazy
waves. Blue light waves are shorter than red
light waves.

From Cinematic Color : a study of color

science begins with the spectrum. One
measures light energy as a function of
wavelengths. […] Light towards the
middle of this range (yellow-green) is
perceived as being most luminous.

Light is an electromagnetic radiation which

is visible to the human eye.

All light travels in a straight line unless

something gets in the way and does one of
these things :

Reflect it (like a mirror).

Refract it (bend like a prism).
Scatter it (like molecules of the gases in
the atmosphere).

We could also add Diffraction to this list,

even if it looks like a more complex
phenomenon.

Light is the source of all colors. It is

actually stunning how important light is in
our lives. When a lemon appears yellow, it
is because its surface reflects the yellow
color rather than because it is really
yellow. It has confused me a lot in the past
but pigments appear colored because they
selectively reflect and absorb certain
wavelengths of visible light.

Most of these notions come from Wikipedia

and you can find plenty of articles on this
topic online. Here is a more technical
description :

Light is an electromagnetic radiation

which is visible to the human eye. Visible
light is usually defined as having
wavelengths in the range of 400-700
nanometres between the infrared (with
longer wavelengths) and the ultraviolet
(with shorter wavelengths). These waves
are made of photons.

FROM LIGHT TO COLOUR

So how do we go from Light Spectra to

Colour ? I cannot explain the Color
Matching Functions more clearly than
Jeremy Selan, so I’ll just quote him :

The human visual system […] is

trichromatic. Thus, color can be fully
specified as a function of three variables.
Through a series of perceptual
experiments, the color community has
derived three curves, the CIE1931 color
matching functions, which allow for the
conversion of spectral energy into a
measure of color.

— From the amazing Cinematic Color.

The CIE 1931 Color Matching Functions

convert spectral energy distributions into a
measure of color, XYZ. XYZ predicts if two
spectral distributions appear identical to an
average human observer. […] When you
integrate a spectral power distribution with
CIE 1931 curves, the output is referred to as
CIE XYZ tristumulus values.

— Metarism is at the base of everything.

It has taken me a while to connect the dots

and I do not think I could have figured this
out without this amazing diagram from
hg2dc.com :

When one converts all possible spectra into

x,y,Y space and plots x,y they fall into a
horse-shoe shaped region on the
chromaticity chart.

Let’s recap ! So far we have seen that :

We, poor humans, can be tricked very

easily.
The Human Visual System (HVS) is
incredibly complex.
Light and Colour are two inseparable
subjects.
Spectral wavelengths got “converted” to
Chromaticity Diagrams (the horse-shoe
shape) for the first time in 1931.

THE CIE CHROMATICITY

DIAGRAMS FROM 1931 AND
1976

The CIE XYZ is a Chromaticity Diagram

defined by the International Commission on
Illumination (CIE) in 1931. It is the first step
to describe colors based on human vision.

The two main CIE diagrams from 1931 and

1976.

CIE scientists met in 1931 to represent the

colors as we see them. The CIE XYZ
chromaticity diagram was born ! They met
45 years later to improve it : CIE U’V’ was
created. Even if the CIE U’V’ from 1976 is a
more “perceptually uniform” variation, the
one from 1931 is still the most used in the
color community. Old habits die hard.

The research of David L. MacAdam

(1942) showed that the CIE 1931 xy
chromaticity diagram did not offer
perceptual uniformity. What this means
is that the relation between the
measurable chromaticity of a color and
the error margin in observation, was not
consistent within the CIE 1931 xy
chromaticity diagram.

— From this amazing article.

Here are two important notions about

Chromaticity Diagrams :

These chromaticity diagrams are the

visualization of all chromaticities
perceivable by the human eye.
2 axis are available to give each
chromaticity an unique coordinate on
this diagram.

From Cinematic Color : the region inside

the horse-shoe represents all possible
integrated color spectra; the region
outside does not correspond to
physically-possible colors.

— Horseshoe or tongue shaped area. It really

depends. It could be a windsurf sail as well.

The CIE XYZ serves as a standard reference

against which many other color spaces are
defined. Keep these diagrams in mind
because we are going to constantly refer to
them later on.

Chromaticity or Color ?

At this point, you may ask yourself : what is

the difference between a Chromaticity and
a Color ? It is a proper question. Basically,
every time we mention the terms “Color”
or “Hue”, we enter the field of “perception“.
This means that a color only exists when it
is perceived by a human being (or what we
call a “Standard Observer“).

On the other hand, a chromaticity is a

stimulus. It does not include any notion of