diffuse and specular reflectance

Color Spaces of the VFX Pipeline Part 2: World Space

Bird at sunset

The visual effects color pipeline starts in the real world, of course. The light from surfaces and light sources are captured by cameras and travels a data path through several “spaces” to the movie screen. The challenge for visual effects is that the real world presents color and light in a totally different way that far exceeds the capacity of our display devices so a degraded version of the original scene must be carefully managed in order to deliver the most realistic version of the original scene to the audience. The real world is not a “color space” in the color science sense, but instead is presented here as the “World Space” where our entire VFX pipeline begins.

To access this post, you must purchase Site Membership.