What is ACES 2?¶
ACES 2 is the second major release of the ACES (Academy Color Encoding System) framework and focuses on delivering a more complete and consistent end-to-end color management solution.
What’s New in ACES 2¶
The most significant change in ACES 2 is the introduction of a completely redesigned suite of rendering transforms. However, ACES 2 introduces a number of important improvements and additions, including:
- New Output Transforms for rendering ACES images to displays, featuring:
- A less aggressive tone scale with reduced mid-tone contrast and a gentler highlight rolloff
- More intuitive parameter controls for supporting custom or uncommon display configurations
- Robust gamut mapping for improved perceptual uniformity and reduced clipping artifacts
- Optimized performance for inverse transforms
- Additional transforms with preset parameters targeting common display calibration standards
- Enhanced AMF (ACES Metadata File) Specification
- Updated specification of ACES Transform IDs, plus a manifest of Transform IDs available at each ACES version tag since v1.0
- Recommendations for using compression in ACES OpenEXRs
- New Recommendations for generating Input Transforms for prosumer-level cameras
- New Tools for generating Input Transforms
- Expanded Documentation across all components, with plans for continued additions to add clarity of intended behavior, user guides, document recommended workflows, as well as a history of the discussions and reasoning for various design decisions
The ACES 2 feature set was developed in direct response to the top feature requests and user feedback from ACES 1 users.