Autodesk Color Management (also known as the Synergy color management component, or SynColor) is a shared technology component that is integrated into several Autodesk applications. This allows for consistent processing, interpretation, and communication of colors throughout a mixed pipeline.
Autodesk Color Management is designed to support a variety of color management methodologies, including ACES, ICC, OpenColorIO, and ASC CDL. It allows you to work with different color spaces and encodings so that you can adopt new workflows or emulate legacy ones.
Autodesk Color Management consists of a color engine together with a collection of transformations suitable for input, output, display, and other situations. The transforms are provided as separate files in .ctf format, an extension of the Academy/ASC XML color transform format. You can combine multiple files to create complex transformations, and in addition you can author your own files for custom purposes.
The color engine supports a wide variety of color operations, including 1D look-up tables (LUTs), 3D LUTs, gamma, log/antilog, exposure-contrast, matrix multiplication, and more.
In addition to native .ctf files, Autodesk Color Management can import many common color transform file formats, including the legacy Autodesk .lut and .3dl formats as well as third-party formats such Cinespace, Iridas, Pandora, and Nuke.
Not all features are available in every application that supports Autodesk Color Management. In addition, the implementation and workflows are different for different applications.
For example, in Flame Premium and other Creative Finishing products, you can specify the exact color transform or chain of transforms that you want to apply. You can then export a chain as a single file for reuse. However in Maya, you generally specify the desired color spaces, and the system applies the transforms that are necessary to convert between those color spaces.
For information about how to work with the features available in a specific Autodesk application, see the documentation for that application.