Get Started with Color Management

Color management gives you the advantages of a scene-linear workflow, while still showing a preview that is appropriate for your display in the viewport and Render View.

Color management walk-through

Watch the video for a quick walk-through of color management in Maya.

Captions are available. To enable and disable the captions, or to switch languages, click the CC button on the bottom-right corner of the video player.

Set up color management

1. Enable color management in the scene:

   • Color management is enabled in new scenes by default, but there are some other settings you should check. See Enable or disable color management.
   • To apply color management to existing scenes, see Apply color management to existing scenes.
2. Set Rendering Space to the working color space to use for rendering. See Choose a rendering space.
3. For most situations, you should set the View Transform to the same tone map that will be used for the final output. For example, if the project will be using the standard ACES tone map, then select ACES RRT. For additional considerations, see Choose the default View Transform.
4. In Input Color Space Rules, set the Default rule to the color space used by most of your image inputs. You can add additional rules based on your file naming conventions. See Define rules to assign color spaces for input files.

   The color space determined by the rules will be used by default as the initial setting for new 2D File textures and other image inputs, except for IBL nodes which default to Raw. You can still change each one individually.

Note: You should not enable color management when baking texture colors with Turtle. If you do, the viewport preview will be inaccurate.

Add color-managed image inputs

When you add 2D File textures and other image inputs to your scene, you need to specify their input Color Space if it is different from the one assigned by the rules. See Specify the color space for textures and other image inputs for more information.

Preview the scene

As you work, the view transform provides a preview of the final colors in the viewport and Render View. However, you can temporarily toggle the view transform off or choose a different one for diagnostic or other purposes. See Preview color-managed scenes.

For playblasts, the Apply Output Transform to Playblast option applies the selected transform to convert from the rendering space. Normally this option should be on, to allow the result to be played with devices or viewing software that does not apply the appropriate view transform to scene-linear images.

Render the scene

When you render the scene, you have the option of baking in an output transform, depending on whether you are rendering a preview or rendering images for further processing like compositing. See Render color-managed scenes.

Legacy color management features

The defaultViewColorManager node is still available in scenes for compatibility. However, its options are not used.