That is thanks largely to ACES (Academy Color Encoding System), a color system aspiring to become the industry standard for managing for motion picture and television production. But a funny thing has happened since then - along with many formerly niche Prolost subjects such as large sensors, 24 fps, and cinematic color, the topic of color management has become, and I can’t believe I’m writing this, popular? So what’s up? Yes, We’re Back to This Againīack in 2009 (yikes) I tried to draw to a close my long history of writing about linear light and how it affects 3D rendering and compositing. A middle-gray card at a camera store is an 18% gray card. And anyone who has shopped for physical camera charts knows that you don’t buy “50% gray” cards. Our idealized pure-black patches remain unchanged.īut anyone who has moved a camera out of Auto mode knows that overexposing by one stop does not slam middle-gray into pure white.

The perfectly-white regions are now overexposed to 200%, which looks the same as 100% in this non-HDR view. Predictably, the 50% region has doubled to 100%.

Magic bullet colorista v