Custom ACES Part 4: Updating For Resolve 17

Day 10: 24 Insights in 24 Days New Year Marathon

Updating My Custom ACES Workflow

I’m a huge fan of both using a fixed node structure and building my own custom ACES pipeline in the Resolve node tree. I think the flexibility of custom ACES, along with the speed and utility of a fixed node tree makes for a compelling workflow.

Now that Resolve 17 is out in public beta – with all-new, color space aware grading tools and improved color management across the board – I didn’t want to just sit around and leave my workflow unchanged, but I also didn’t want to throw it all away and start fresh.

So in this Insight, I’m going to go through my thought process in updating my fixed custom ACES tree to better work with the new HDR grading tool – and I’m also going to show an ACES-alternative version that uses the new DaVinci Wide Gamut colorspace.

Grading In DaVinci Wide Gamut

One of the most interesting updates in Resolve 17 is the introduction of the DaVinci Wide Gamut colorspace. In gamut, it is very similar to ACES – so the same idea of transforming to, then grading in, a wide gamut space and subsequently transforming into the display space also works very well with DaVinci Wide Gamut, and Resolve color-managed projects. But I wanted to take it to another level and see if I could apply the same techniques of building the color management pipeline in the node tree – and sure enough, it works great!

So if you haven’t watched my series on fixed node trees and custom ACES – it may help to have a look at those first, but in this Insight I’ll cover:

• Modernizing my custom ACES node tree
• Manual HDR tool color space settings
• HDR tool order of operations
• Converting the custom ACES tree to use DaVinci Wide Gamut instead of ACEScct

As always – leave any comments or questions below!

-Joey