Color management

Mendoman

So I've been playing around with Blender some more, and this time my question is how are other people using color management. I know that in view transform Filmic has it's advantages, especially indoors when you can pump more light inside, but in my opinion, the resulting image always looks kind of washed out, so most of the time I go with standard. Standard has nice colors and is much closer to what Iray produces ( only my opinion again of course ). So I was wondering has anybody found nice color management scheme where you get best of the both worlds?

SadRobot

Filmic high contrast. Or I grade an EXR in Resolve.

TheKD

Yeah, I normally go with 32bit exr, and do my color, contrast, exposure etc in photoshop.

Krys Kryngle

I've been working on this myself and I'd love to see what others have come up with.  From the guy who wrote the Filmic add-on-

Filmic Log Encoding Base. This is the workhorse View for all of your rendering work. Setting it in the View will result in a log encoded appearance, which will look exceptionally low contrast. Use this if you want to adjust the image for grading using another tool such as Resolve, with no additional modifications. Save to a high bit depth display referred format such as 16 bit TIFF. This basic view is designed to be coupled with one of the contrast looks.

So, filmic renders will always look flat and will need postwork either in the compositor or a photo/video editor (turning the contrast up works ok, but just ok).  I think this mimics real world video/photography as well when they shoot using the log profile.  At the end of BlenderGuru's popular video entitled 'The Secret Ingredient to Photorealism', he explains how to add the color balance node (using offset/power/slope) to adjust your renders in the Blender compositor.  Padone had posted a printer test file that I use for adjusting black, white, and mid-gray - Thanks Padone!

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/5826556/#Comment_5826556

Starting out, I think many of us might benefit from using 'Standard' instead of filmic.  As we get better and push our renders further, filmic may be a better choice.  Just my opinion though.

I just started scratching the surface on this subject, so if I said anything that is not correct, please let me know.  I'd love to see what others have to say.  :)

 

 

Mendoman

Thanks guys. I totally suck with postwork, and since I mainly try to do animations with Blender, it's probably too much work to postwork every frame, so I think I'll give it a try with compositor. Heh, I'm terrible with that too, but you live and you learn, right 

Padone

As for filmic vs standard. As I see it the filmic view mimics better the human perception, where the eyes get the data at various iris apertures depending on the part of the environment you're focusing at. Then the brain reconstruct a global vision that may resemble a HDRI image with low contrast on dark and bright areas. On the other side the standard view may mimic better a real camera, where we get overexposure and burned blacks depending on the camera iso settings and scene light conditions.

For generic shots I tend to go with filmic high contrast the same as @SadRobot. But I'll switch to standard if I need overexposure effects such as strong rim lights.