Filmic and ACES

[Eary]

Not the topic to talk about this. In terms of dynamic range or tonemapping, which is what the original poster was struggling with, ACES and Filmic have exactly the same dynamic range with ACES being slightly more contrasty by default (Filmic High Contrast Look gives about the same contrast level). Using ACES would not make the original poster happy. What they need is to understand the difference between open domain scene referred 0 to infinity data and close domain display referred 0 to 1 data.

As for ACES, here is the thing about it:

@Chris-Brejon

If you pay attention to the Chapter 1.5 of my book about ACES, it has gone through several updates over the past year. Going from “ACES is awesome” to “ACES has issues and limitations”. I have tried to update as best as I could every time I discovered something new or relevant and that was able to test it myself. I still need to update the article during holidays because I don´t think I am explaining clearly enough what ACES really does.

Let me give you an example. I was helping a French studio last October about color management. They told me that they wanted to switch to ACES because they were currently clipping their values on display. I replied to them : this what ACES does as well ! If you look at the CTL code of the Output Transforms, there is a clip in there.

Again, please read the Chris Brejon article I linked above

@Eary

Before I write everything, I would actually like to link a kind of long article but I guarantee it would be a worth read, by Chris Brejon: OCIO, Display Transforms and Misconceptions - Chris Brejon

@Funnybob

getting it to work in Nuke or Resolve is a lot of trouble.

Don’t know if you are aware, Troy recently has been working on a Filmic Nuke thing, as for resolve, he also has a Filmic Resolve that is not fully working yet.