Color Management Made Easy (Easier)

This post was born from a recent Facebook post that brought up the topic of color management in architectural visualization and how little it is understood.  It also brought up several dozen "workflows" that well intentioned artists kludged together to make color management work for them.  Sadly color management is not something you can hack. You either do it correctly, or you don't. But none of this is a new problem, it's been around for the last 25+ years and still confuses almost everyone.  I'll blame Adobe for not working on this problem and making it easier to implement and understand.

Properly implemented color management is an incredibly powerful tool that every single person in this industry should be using. However, used incorrectly and you can not only destroy the underlying color data in your images, but make it a nightmare for anyone else to view your renderings with any consistency or in the way you intended.

I personally started my own journey into color management some 20 years ago and like most, was totally baffled by all the settings, how they related to one another,  why my renderings looked different between machines, why print outs did not match and why my clients saw something different than me.  

Finally, I'd had enough and read literally every single book on color management that exists.  I can assure you, you need a special kind of stamina and will power to do that, but that work inspired the idea to write a chapter for a book on rendering collaborated upon by a few dozen authors back in 2010. My chapter of course was on Color Management. I can tell you that once the lightbulb goes off, you will wonder why you did not understand it earlier.  Once you finally get it, managing color becomes so much easier and it's so much easier to troubleshoot issues.

The original book "3ds Max 2010 Architectural Visualization - Advanced to Expert" was the most comprehensive book on visualization workflows ever written and was the brain child of Author and editor Brian Smith.  As it's been 10 years since that book came out, and still the misunderstandings around color management exist, I'm resurrecting my efforts to help all of the artists in the industry wrap their heads around this.

At this link below you can download a PDF version of the chapter I wrote. It is not only a summary of everything I've learned, but a comprehensive outline of how to use color management in architectural visualization workflows.
 

DOWNLOAD the COLOR MANAGEMENT Chapter HERE (15MB)

As it's been ten years since this was published I can't promise every setting will be in the same place, but the knowledge and understanding of color management remains the same. 

There are a few things that are unique to 3D workflows that have also changed in recent years due to how Windows uses color management, the way some displays now work (features they have) and a few other "gotchas", but happy to walk through those and the options on the forum thread below.

One great new development since this was published was the update by Chaos Group several years back that allows users to load a display profile into the V-Ray frame buffer to ensure a more seamless workflow. For all of those rendering engines that still do not support ICC profiles and are not color managed, first looby those vendors to implement it as it's ridiculous to not support color management in this day and age.  However, I have a workaround on page 1-40 under "Opening a New Rendering" that will tell you how to work around this.

If after you've read the chapter and you still have questions, please post them on our color management forum here: http://forums.cgarchitect.com/204-color-management/   I'll do my best to respond there and if there is enough interest I'll look at perhaps setting up a GoToWebinar to have live Q&A session.  

I have a bit of a sick fascination now with color management, so its been a personal mission for most of my career to help educate artists in arch viz how to set this up properly and help fix the issues they run into. 

If you want me to do a one on one consultation for you or your company you can email me here: jmottle@cgarchitect.com and we can discuss.