I love this explanation of AgX and Filmic. I just updated Blender and I was confused why AgX feels like the colors are washed out and I preferred how Filmic looks in a particular render. So i thought "am I wrong? Do I need to get my eyes checked, why are people going crazy for AgX?" 😂 After watching this video, it made sense. AgX isn't about what looks better visually, it is about reaching realistic light behaviors, and a lot of people who are used to Filmic, would find it weird at first but would understand that if you're looking for realistic light behaviors, AgX does better tone mapping!
THANK YOU! I've been struggling with the new color displaying change and wanted to switch from the new pale and boring atmospheric colors to the good old and reliable filmic option.
In the Light Perception chapter you implied that this transform is done to convert linear brightness to the way human eyes perceive brightness which is logarithmic. This is misleading, as that's not the reasons the transform is needed. If you think about it, having double amount of rendered light be displayed as double amount of physical light on the screen, doesn't change anything, since in both cases double the amount of photons are entering the eye, and in both cases eye/brain is then experiencing them logarithmically. The only reason the transform is needed is because displays, especially SDR ones, are not able to reproduce majority of the brightness range that human eye can experience. Displays can't show real life levels of nits, and if they showed true-to-life brightness the best they could, then anything above a certain point would get clipped, which would look very immersion breaking, seeing nothing that's above 200 nits in real life. So we bring down the brightness until there's no more significant clipping, but this results in very dark image, unrealistically dark, which looks even worse than clipping. So we compromise, and drastically bring up the brightness with a curved function such that highlights never clip, which drastically reduces highlight contrast, but now the image is at least legible, and the tradeoff is worth it. The result is that it is better to apply tone mapping curve to linear light signal before passing on the signal to the display. If we had oled displays that can show any arbitrary amount of nits, we could feed it linear signal and that would in a perfect viewing environment look like a portal into reality, provided we closed one eye. At that point, any static tone mapping would be making the image less realistic, not more.
Thank you for giving these important information about the new AgX View transform color Management. If possible, it could be relevant to give a help about the correct Display Device to choose (especially for Mac users) as well as the correct Sequencer to choose? Also, what type of color space should we select in the image texture, now ? Definitely worth it. Thank you !
This is massive. I'm rendering my next project with it. Is it rendered in a Log profile I can then convert in Davinci Resolve or is this only like regular Filmic?
It is nice to have the option and saving a lot of information that would otherwise clip. You can of course choose a more saturated or punchy style in post! :)
0:22 Are we sure the apples on the left are in Filmic and not in Standard? While AgX is noticeably better, the difference between AgX and Filmic didn't seem to be THAT big to me from previous comparisons I've seen. Filmic does desaturate overexposed parts, but the apples had no desaturation at all, just like in Standard, they really don't look like in Filmic. Makes me think some of the comparisons may have something that makes them not totally fair.
Yes, the apples on the left are with the filmic view transform. I took these examples from the proposal of its original creator, so I´m pretty certain that these are legit. You have a good point, but that is exactly what I show in the video. In standard situations with a nearly white light source around 5000 - 6500 Kelvin, we don't see enormous differences. However, with extreme coloured lights, the effect is much more noticeable.
Is this actually more accurate to the light that our eyes would receive or is it a distortion? Like, if i had a display that can show any amount of nits, would thid output the correct result?
I would say, technically yes. It is about the dynamic range which can be captured and displayed by the computer. But even if you have a display with infinite amount of nits the last problem would be our eyes. They can capture an impressive amount of dynamic range and brighntess values, depending on the environment and other factors, but also start to clip the colours eventually.
Yes agx is great when stand alone, but ACES should be supplied by stock, with a decent workflow (current workflow is garbage you have to download a 2gb git than extract it then there are like 800 million different color settings when importing textures, something that by this point should be automatic). agx is a nightmare when trying to combine with live action footage. yet another step made by blender that sets them further back in becoming mainstream vfx software.
