Control Your Mastering White Point, Control Your Highlights

Part 1: FilmLight’s Daniele Siragusano discusses the colour grading impact of custom white points

I had the unique opportunity and pleasure of talking with (interrogating?) FilmLight Image Engineer Daniele Siragusano. He agreed to delve deep into the foundational ‘white points’ topic in different colour spaces. It’s a rather confusing topic – with lots of cryptic terms and overlapping acronyms – and I hoped he could unwind these concepts for me.

Join me as I sit with FilmLight engineer Daniele Siragusano to discuss white points, the neutral axis, and its application to colourists and finishers.

Daniele is an enthusiastic presenter who passionately dove into this technical concept and clearly explained what workflows utilize differing white points. I think I found the right person to deconstruct this for us.

Understanding the neutral axis and using White Points effectively and aesthetically

The White point (or neutral axis) is a technical concept that can be difficult to understand. Working as a Baselight assistant early in my career, this colour management principle went over my head. This Insight aims to relieve any post-production professional who has not grasped why custom White points would be used in a workflow.

“When we expose the image upwards… You can see in the chromaticity diagram that we are always moving toward the white point. I cannot escape that compression towards the white point, right? Especially for bright highlights and things like clouds. To make warm highlights, you cannot just go into the highlights and make them warm because, at some point, the DRT will desaturate to D65.”

Daniele Siragusano, Image Engineer, FilmLight

The White Point Journey

There are various “white points” at different stages in a color-managed pipeline.

Scene White Point