Perceptual Color Processing
The Colorfront Engine’s parametric color processing pipeline is tailored to support the full spectrum of production needs across both broadcast and scripted content, impacting every part of the imaging pipeline.
SDR
HDR
SDR
HDR
SDR
HDR
SDR
HDR
SDR
HDR
From on-set work and dailies through editorial, VFX, color grading, and mastering, it seamlessly maps diverse input formats, including camera-original (scene-referred) and graded (display-referred) images, to a wide range of SDR and HDR output formats.
This includes user- defined brightness levels and color gamuts, all while preserving creative intent.
This includes user- defined brightness levels and color gamuts, all while preserving creative intent.
Image Mapping
By mapping images into a perceptual space, content is tailored to the brightness and gamut of the target display, ensuring a consistent appearance across formats. In this non-linear space, color and brightness adapt in ways that reflect the non-linearities of human vision. For example, a bright image may show a hue shift on a scope due to the perceptual processing model, which is designed to mimic how the human eye perceives color and brightness.
Ambient Surround
The ambient surround used during mastering also influences image rendering, ensuring the final image on any display aligns with the reference master. This perceptual transform faithfully reproduces images across different displays, adapting to various viewing conditions while maintaining the image’s appearance across different display brightness levels, color primaries, and surrounding brightness levels.
Custom Processing Color Space
This custom processing color space is based on extensive knowledge of human color perception from scientific literature and years of experience in high-end feature film color management.
Color Perception
Human Visual Color Perception Considerations
Below are the some of the specific effects of human color perception considered in the Colorfront Engine’s design:
Bezold-Brücke Hue Shift:
The hue of monochromatic light varies with luminance.
Stevens Effect:
Contrast increases with luminance.
Helmholtz-Kohlrausch Effect:
Brightness perception increases with saturation.
Abney Effect:
The hue of monochromatic light shifts with the addition of white light.
Hunt Effect:
Colorfulness increases with luminance, requiring compensation when adapting an image to a different brightness level than the reference master. The Hunt effect describes how an in- crease in brightness can make a picture appear more colorful; proper compensation ensures color consistency.
Chromatic Adaptation:
Human color perception adjusts to the white point of the lighting when viewing reflective
objects.
objects.
Perceptual Model
Colorfront Engine Perceptual Model Visualization
In an end-to-end workflow, the image first passes through an IDT (Input Device Transform) into a common grading space, followed by an output transform that adjusts the reference look for various output levels.
Brightness and surround parameters can be tuned to compensate for different viewing environments, whether dark or bright.
Additionally, inverse transforms are available for legacy deliveries, enabling previously graded Rec.709 or other HDR materials to be reverted back into the grading space, as these transforms are fully invertible.
Brightness and surround parameters can be tuned to compensate for different viewing environments, whether dark or bright.
Additionally, inverse transforms are available for legacy deliveries, enabling previously graded Rec.709 or other HDR materials to be reverted back into the grading space, as these transforms are fully invertible.
