This new update introduces new black and white point controls with RGB-CMY splitting, full support for iPad and Android tablets, a new and improved user guide with many in-depth tips and tricks and many small changes under the hood. Let's dive in and see what's new in the Color.io App
When working with either the new Black Point or White Point sliders, by default, all color channels are moved in unison. This means when you adjust the Black Point, for instance, you're uniformly altering the intensity of all colors in the dark areas. Likewise, the White Point slider simultaneously adjusts all color channels in the brighter regions of your image.
If you want more granular control over the colors in your blacks and whites, you can detach the channels by clicking on the link icon below the sliders. Once decoupled, each RGB-CMY channel relationship can be manipulated independently.
This decoupling feature allows you to infuse color into your blacks and whites. For instance, adjusting the Red channel in the Black Point slider can add a warm, reddish tone to your shadows, while manipulating the Blue channel in the White Point slider might add a cool tint to your highlights.
Heavily requested and now a reality: The analog color engine has been updated to take advantage of high end mobile GPUs like those built into Apple devices and top range Android phones and tablets. All controls in Color.io now work with touch input and Apple Pencil for fine tuning every knob and slider. This upate technically enables hardware accelerated HQ processing on mobile devices and paves the way to full mobile support coming in the next few weeks.
The user guide has received a major overhaul with better navigation, a clear and semantic structure and, most importantly, many in-depth tips and tricks that were previously undocumented.
https://www.color.io/user-guide/get-started
As always, thanks a ton for your help, suggestions, bug reports and encouragement!
The RAW image processor in Color.io just got a major upgrade - the new and improved VisionLog Raw curve has significantly better highlight and shadow protection and softer color gradations. The color science is now closely aligned with the internal ACEScct working space so you'll also see a better overall color response when grading raw images in VisionLog 2.0.
VisionLog RAW 2.0 is the new default for all raw image processing in Color.io, so for new images, you don't have to do anything to enable it.
However, if you currently have any raw images loaded into the app, you have to re-interpret them using the updated process.
Just follow these three simple steps to do that:
The latest version of Color.io comes with an improved halation algorithm and updated control behaviour. The new algorithm improves the glow core with exponential light falloff and color gradation to more accurately simluate real film halation. The new grain engine has also been adjusted to reach deeper into the glow of the highlights. The new version is live at app.color.io so give it a try and let me know what you think!
Todays minor update introduces a new export format option for Pro users, important bug fixes and a lot of internal work that paves the road for the next major version update!
A previous update introduced tiled rendering to support very high resolution exports that do not overwhelm the WebGL rendering core. There was a rounding error in the tile calculation that partitions the image rectangle into the sub-grid for rendering that caused a half pixel shift for exported images, resulting in a slightly blurred image. This has now been fixed and full resolution exports are pixel-perfectly-crisp now.
Previously, LUTs exported for an ACES working space could contain NaN (Not a Number) errors in the lattice, resulting in "holes" in the LUT file. This was due to the inability to index out-of-range values which can occur in ACES. This has been fixed by extending the index range for the internal output transformers and NaN errors should be a thing of the past.
This update introduces Tiff as a new export format available for Pro Users. There's not much to say about this other than it's a standard tiff implementation that supports an alpha channel. There's generally no quality gain over lossless PNG but TIFF might come in handy for some workflows so choose it when you need it.
Color.io allows you to design looks that can be integrated into third party ACES color managed workflows. I added documentation on how to export LUTs for an ACES working space in Davinci Resolve with some pointers on how to setup your node structure and ACES transforms: https://www.color.io/user-guide/using-color-io-with-davinci-resolve
A lot of things have changed under the hood as I'm preparing the first major update since Color.io soft-launched one month ago. Thanks to the amazing feedback I got from users via email, this feedback board and via lift-gamma-gain.com, a clear vision of where the app should be headed next, has been established:
Right now, all adjustments are scene specific, meaning that the same color grade is applied to every image in a scene. While this is very useful, it would be even better if some adjustments could be made on a per-image basis. This requires some architectural changes of the processing core but it's the right direction to take. Things like grain and halation as well as basic exposure and saturation corrections make more sense to be applied as a per-image pre-processing step before color grading. This will also open the door to masking and additional image correction tools for photographers.
The next major update will introduce advanced film acutance and grain modeling emulation that I'm super excited about. What makes this new model incredibly powerful is that it breaks the image apart and re-builds it, pixel-by-pixel, from physically accurate grain patterns with varying density. This approach completely changes the pixel structure of digital photos, introducing a subtle but powerful meta layer that further blurs the lines between digital and film. This module will replace the current grain implemention and will be part of the image specific adjustments. I'm currently working on optimizing the real time rendering of the acutance distribution.
Some of you probably remember the subtractive CMY channel mixer I had in an early alpha release of the app. I sacrificed it for adding the grain and halation modules into the main interface for the public release but since grain and halation will be moved into the image editing tool section of the next version, you can expect a return of the cmy channel mixer into the luminance panel. It is a great tool to "finish" a look. I'm thinking about splitting it up into shadows and highlights, similar to the Refraction emulator. Let me know your ideas!
As always, thank you so much for using the app and for providing me with the feedback and bug reports that make all of this possible. I launched Color.io with the sincere desire to improve and extend features based on user feedback to create the most useful tool for my own work and others. I could't be more grateful for the response the app has received so far and looking forward to where we're going next!
Jonathan | Color.io
Todays update introduces a new option to install Color.io to your desktop, export to different color spaces, bug fixes and improvements!
Color.io is a progressive web application (PWA). Progressive Web Apps run in the browser but they can also be installed as fullscreen apps on many devices.
Desktop PWA installation is currently supported by Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge on Linux, Windows, macOS, and Chromebooks. These browsers will show an install badge (icon) in the URL bar (see the image below), stating that Color.io is installable.
Thanks to your feedback, there's now also an option to override the color management for exporting LUTs and DCTLs into third party workflows. This allows you to embed any look you create in Color.io in an ACES working space project or timeline. You can find the export color space override at the bottom of the export panel:
I'm currently laying the ground work for two major improvements for the app:
As always, thanks a ton for all of your feedback and suggestion! May you be peaceful, may you be happy.
Jonathan | Color.io
