Color Management Part 25: Corporate Brand Colors and ACES by Chris Zwar

For sure sectors of the business, working with company branding colours is a vital side of the job. In Part 24, I checked out how we will cope with company branding tips when working with common Standard Dynamic Range tasks. The key takeaway is that company colours are all the time outlined utilizing the sRGB colorspace, and we have to convert these RGB values accordingly if we’re outputting to Rec.709.

Because Prores Quicktimes are all the time assumed to be Rec.709, ignoring shade administration can lead to shade and brightness shifts, typically incorrectly blamed on a “Quicktime gamma bug”.

In this video, a direct follow-on from Part 24, I have a look at how we cope with sRGB branding colours after we are working with High Dynamic Range and ACES.

I’ve spent a good bit of time pondering whether or not or not it is a area of interest subject. But having spent the earlier week coping with precisely the problems outlined on this video, it’s definitely going to grow to be more and more related.

This video is tying collectively a number of matters which have been coated beforehand. Firstly, ACES was launched again in Part 12, and it gives an business normal for working with High Dynamic Range video. In Part 19 we launched High Dynamic Range video, after which in Part 20 we checked out plenty of eventualities that every one show how and why working with HDR merely appears to be like higher. In Parts 22 & 23 we checked out how HDR video is tone mapped for Standard Dynamic Range outputs. Most lately, Part 24 emphasised that company model colours are all the time outlined utilizing sRGB values, and we have to use shade administration so they continue to be correct when they’re output to Rec.709 Prores.

So what’s the issue with ACES?

The reply is partly to do with the state of the company business in 2024. After Effects is a massively common utility, nevertheless it’s dominant within the areas of the business the place High Dynamic Range and ACES are but to make an affect. Every movement designer I do know remains to be working with Standard Dynamic Range tasks – that’s 8 or 16 bit, utilizing sRGB or Rec.709. There are many areas the place After Effects has a dominant market share – promoting, reside occasions, product launches, conferences, massive scale projections, broadcast promotions, POS shows and that’s earlier than we even begin to think about social media platforms and the large quantity of content material uploaded every single day. All of those areas are nonetheless utilizing common SDR video – typically Prores Quicktimes for “masters” and MP4s for streaming.

The forms of productions which might be most certainly to make use of After Effects are additionally the forms of productions the place company model tips are critically essential.

ACES was designed for giant scale, high-end productions together with function movies and premium TV exhibits. I don’t assume that they had movement design on the prime of the record when it was being developed, and I don’t assume the common VFX artist wants to fret about RGB model colours after they’re compositing Hollywood blockbusters.

But the know-how for HDR manufacturing is right here, and compositing using HDR & ACES just looks better. So After Effects customers are going to see a rise in HDR and ACES productions – possibly not in a single day, however definitely over the subsequent few years. On a private degree, nearly all of promoting tasks I’ve labored on over the previous 4 or probably 5 years have been accomplished utilizing ACES. It’s only a matter of time.

So tying all these earlier threads collectively: it’s straightforward to make the choice to work in an ACES challenge, as a result of it merely appears to be like higher. And we will composite in High Dynamic Range whereas rendering and delivering a Standard Dynamic Range Prores grasp. But this course of will end in modifications to the brightness of the ultimate consequence, and this consists of any branding colours used. Obviously branding colours must be correct within the remaining, delivered masters – and so right here we’re.

This is an element 25 in a protracted sequence on shade administration. If you’ve missed the opposite elements, you possibly can catch up right here:

Part 1: The honeymoon is over

Part 2: Newton’s Prisms

Part 3: It’s all in the brain

Part 4: Maxwell’s spinning discs

Part 5: Introducing CIE 1931

Part 6: Understanding the CIE 1931 chromaticity diagram

Part 7: Introducing gamma

Part 8: Introducing Colorspaces

Part 9: The theory of a color managed workflow

Part 10: Using After Effects built-in color management

Part 11: Introducing OpenColor IO

Part 12: Introducing ACES

Part 13: OpenColorIO and After Effects

Part 14: Combining OCIO with After Effects

Part 15: Logarithmic file formats

Part 16: RAW video files

Unscripted: Looking at ACES and OCIO in After Effects 2023

Part 17: Linear Compositing

Part 18: Bit Depth

Part 19: Introducing High Dynamic Range

Part 20: High Dynamic Range Compositing just looks better!

Part 21: HDR Formats, Colorspaces and TLAs

Part 22: Introducing Tone Mapping

Part 23: HDR Tone Mapping

Part 24: Corporate Branding Colors with Standard Dynamic Range

AND – I’ve been writing After Effects articles and tutorials for over 20 years. Please take a look at a few of my other ProVideo Coalition articles.