Now in Beta: Enable Log Color Management with a Single Click

I agree with @Shebbe — this is just a temporary "band-aid". By trying over simplify color management without proper color science, you eventually end up forcing your professional customers to use other tools for color critical work. I understand the goal of trying to simplify color management, but the direction that lead to this "Log Color Management" enable/disable option, unfortunatley seems like a result of making fundamental changes to the image processing and color pipeline, without fully understanding the complexity and needs of your professional customers.

I know you are working hard on improving color management and I appreciate that you publicly share new features and ideas with your Beta community like this. However, I do not think any of your professional customers feel confident about the direction you are heading in, based on features and ideas shared in a context like this.

I would highly recommend that you try to communicate a clear direction for where you are heading in terms of color management. In fact, at this point I think you owe it to your professional community. There is already a statement that was made back in 2021, regarding OpenColorIO and ACES from Adobe, shared via the ASWF community: https://www.aswf.io/blog/industry-support-for-ocio-v2/

Adobe
Adobe is currently working to implement an ACES workflow inside an OpenColor IO v2 wrapper for its tools most often used in production pipelines: Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere Pro. Lars Borg, a SMPTE Fellow and one of the developers of ACES, is a core leader in Adobe’s color team who is leading the charge. His colleague Patrick Palmer, Principal Product Manager for Professional Video, notes that the ability to support ACES in OCIO v2 without a 3D LUT is a significant step forward to driving broad-scale support for ACES, and that the improved GPU renderer in OCIO v2 is a critical area that will drive adoption.

Palmer also shared the following about Adobe’s roadmap: “We are looking forward to having one means of setting up a consistent viewing environment for high dynamic range (HDR) footage. Adobe tools are found in nearly every production pipeline. While our tools have supported almost any colour working space, creating a viewing environment consistent from the set through to post-production, which often spans multiple vendors, was complex and required a high degree of management. We feel that by supporting OCIO, our users will work with higher confidence about what they are viewing. OCIO is becoming standard and allows us to have the same framework as other applications – which yields the same results in all participating products.”

If this really is your goal, why not share that here in the Community forum as well? ACES via OCIO is already in beta for After Effects. Clearly, you would need to also support ACES via OCIO in Premiere Pro, in order to handle color management with Dynamic Link and After Effects.

To those of you in this user community, who still don't understand or appreciate the complexity of the whole situation. Here is an attempt at showing an example of why many professional customers are confused and frustrated.

Transforming Wide Gamut High Dynamic Range images to SDR BT.709, without proper color science, tone mapping, gamut mapping and gamut compression, leads to critical issues like the example in the attached image, with clipping colors and horrible looking images.

If you think this is just an "edge case", think again. Lots of very smart people spent months, if not years, on this particular problem within the Open Source ACES Working Group community. As we speak, they are working actively on ACES 2.0 with new and improved Output Device Transforms: https://community.acescentral.com/t/aces-2-0-cam-drt-development/4700

For those of you unfamilar with the fundamental understanding of color gamuts, gamut mapping and gamut compression, have a look at this introduction to the topic: https://github.com/jedypod/gamut-compress/blob/master/README.md

This is good on two levels - having the option to turn it off is great and the fact that the actual colour management works now (compared to say v22.5 which was the last I looked at it when it was blowing out highlights on Sony log footage - screenshot is same clip, same settings in Pr). 

I gave quite a lot of feedback back when the Tone Map feature was introduced for plenty of valid reasons. Now we see another feature where I have the feeling that it is yet another "band-aid" on top of previous design decisions when the initial approach is just not as refined as it should be.

What immediately strikes me first is the naming. Why 'log' color management. And referring back to my initial feedback in the link above, why not fix it properly and give us the option to fully disable color management. As it stands now from what I can tell, only .jpg and .png files with embedded profiles are auto converted to Rec.709 but no others. And sometimes we don't even want this. The checkbox should just be named [Disable Color Management] and turn of all auto conversions regardles of which file it is.

On top of that we still need a proper way to actually manage it instead of hoping that some random camera log space gets added to that log list. Having OCIO in AE is already a great step forward which will reach Premiere Pro as well soon, but I believe that next to that a solid foundation for Adobe color management can also live. However making checkboxes here and there to 'fix' stuff isn't going to cut it. What's even the point of having it bound to a select few filetypes. Not all Sony camera's bring over the metadata, what if you'd want to use management but you get to only select Rec.709.

I cover this in my other feedback as well I think but I really hope someone at Adobe will consider a much more efficient and open approach to handling this. It can be a complex topic, especially for beginners. But not giving us the tools and freedom to control it makes things only worse as it will sometimes will work and sometimes it wont.

Hey @eric escobar this is great timing as I'm about to start my first Sony XAVC project. I actually like the look of the footage when "Log Management" is enabled vs. the LUT that I was given. Premiere's de-logging, as Neil called it matches what I saw on set more closerly than the LUTs I have and will be a better starting point for grading.

I'm currently unable to test much in the way of Lumetri in Premiere Beta because the app crashes every time I add the effect ( I already filed this as DVAME-4200208. I couldn't classify this as Premiere, which is why it's labeled 'AME'), but since this is an app preference, what will happen to my graded clips if this project is opened on another machine that has "Log Management" disabled? If I'm grading based on the look of my footage with this option enabled, does that mean my grade could look drastically different somewhere else?

Thanks!

But this is only for Sony XAVC clips, right?

So BRAW and others aren't included ... ?

Neil

Thanks Eric, this is so welcome!

A lot of users do want their log "untrammeled" by anyone else's choices, as their workflow is already set to efficiently de-logify their media.

And one could work the other way ... take the 'base' de-logging that Pr does, and create a user-designed normalization for that media as a replacement. I've done that for a few log formats, and it works as well as having a de-logging preset or LUT. Just a different process.

But if you already have a known and working pattern, why make a new one, right?

Neil