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Colour Management Workflow

Colour management works by applying colour transforms and other operations at various stages of the pipeline. Typically, you use colour management when:
  • Importing media. Images from different sources (such as digital cameras, scanned film, 3D renders, and matte paintings) often use different colour spaces and encodings, and you may want to convert them to a single working colour space.
  • Outputting media. Different output formats require different encodings depending on the medium and expected viewing conditions.

You might also want to apply colour transforms to convert into and out of a specific colour space in order to perform a particular operation. For example, operations like compositing or lens blur work best in a linear colour space, while operations like tracking and edge detection work best in video or log colour space.

In addition, colour management is used to display images in Flame to ensure that the colours on the monitor and projector match what will be displayed on the final output as closely as possible.

All media in the application is now tagged with a colour space identifier to help deal with the proliferation of colour encodings used by the increasing variety of capture and display devices. Tagging your media correctly is central to using the colour management features.

Deciding whether to convert media on import

When importing media you may either convert it to a working space or leave it in its original colour space. Each approach has its advantages. If media will be used for extensive compositing in Batch and Action, it is usually best to convert to a common scene-linear working space. In other cases, it may be more convenient to leave it as is (and just tag it appropriately), for example if you have a reference track from offline editorial.

The key concept to realize is that because all media is tagged with a colour space, it is possible to easily work with material in a variety of colour spaces side by side.

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