Color spaces  in Blender a practical explanation

ACES was created by Sony as a Work Color space made for color grading.

The idea is, to be able, to have Footage from multiple sources and multiple Camera Spaces. For Example: A Video Shot on a Red Camera in REDCODERAW, A Video Shot on another Camera in S-LOG and A VFX Sequence from Blender in a Linear Color space and match all of Them.

But using ACES within gives also good results, it looks less pale than Filmic.

But if you are not planning, to make a lot of Compositing afterwards, I would recommend using AGX instead since it comes is directly integrated and has better color accuracy in some cases.

If you want to use ACES in Blender, I would recommend reading my Article ACES in Blender.

AGX was created by the same person who developed Filmic.

But fixes the problems Filmic has with Color accuracy and overall pale colors.

It comes with Blender 4.0 preinstalled. But if you can’t update now, because you are using it in production, you can install it manually.

You can read how to do that in my Article: AGX Color space | Why and How to use it in Blender.

Filmic was the first color space in Blender with the Goal, of creating more realism, to make renderings look more realistic.

After this video by Andrew Price, Filmic was extremely hyped, and soon it became implemented into the official Blender Build.

What t does, it compresses the highlights, making spots which would be completely white in sRGB a bit darker and paler. As it would be in reality or on a Photo, which makes thing look more realistic. It also allows using brighter lights without overexposing the Image. Which also increases the realism of the rendering.

But Filmic also has some issues which got improved with the AGX color space, the successor of Filmic.

One problem I see relatively often in stylized renderings is that the color look way too pale, which makes it even possible, to tell, that people used Blender. This is also the reason, that I started using sRGB for stylized renderings, before I created an integration for ACES in Blender.

The other big issue, that primarily professional users are having is the bad color accuracy, meaning, that the colors you put in look very different as the color in the Rendering. Which is very important for things like branding and with Filmic always required a workaround.

Filmic Log is basically the Filmic color space, but the shadows and highlights are compressed..

The reason for that is, in most formats like JPEG, PNG, MP4… those parts are compressed, to save space. Which makes sense, but can cause problems in post-processing.

But if you want to edit yuor Video and Image afterwards you should use another format like Quicktime or Open EXR anyway.

sRGB (Standard) is the color space which most monitors use. It basically puts out, in color, what you put in. The only problem, that it has is, that Images are overexposed really quick, which makes it look less realistic. Color spaces like ACES, Filmic and AGX fix that but give you less popping and accurate colors.

For example, I created this Commercial in sRGB.

What you can see in these Images is, that PBR Neutral and sRGB are relatively close to the Original, while Filmic and AGX are completely off in Comparison.