Demystifying Colour Spaces, Transfer Functions, and Colour Standards

Filmlight’s Daniele Siragusano Part 2: Untangling industry standards and white papers

As with Part One of this mini-series, my aim for this Insight is to demystify the confusing and slightly intimidating rabbit hole that is colour science. Fortunately, Filmlight engineer Daniele Siragusano is joining me on this endeavour once again, and every time we talk, I learn at least five new nerdy things.

This Insight covers the fundamental building blocks of what we call ‘color spaces’.

It covers the myriad of interconnected standards that colourists rely on daily to deliver accurate deliverables to their clients.

Clearing the jargon hurdle

Breaking down colour spaces into their individual components can quickly become an intimidating exercise. Although significant technical detail is available in standards and reports, this information is not easily digestible or understood by the everyday, only vaguely technical, colourist (e.g., me).

This is where Daniele will step in to help!

This Insight will highlight industry standards and use practical examples in Baselight to help digest this information in a slightly more palatable way. Although I’ll warn you, even with an image engineer literally there to hold my hand, some of the concepts found in standards went over my head.

Even if you don’t understand every detail of Daniele’s explanation, the overarching topics and summaries that we cover are valuable.

Key takeaways from this Insight

By the end of this Insight you should understand: