ACES way to control how much the highlights gets compressed?

[SSmolak]

Ya but at that point, you have moved so far away from those models and what makes them realistic that getting good repeatable results as you would with a photographic approach is out the window.

Aces is overrated and for most artists just a plain bad idea. And you illustrated a very good reason as to why it's bad. It's not just those sky models either. It's blackbody lights, gaussian spectrum lights.... those all are incorrect in aces. You get a far better more real result out of a filmic ocio plain and simple.

Yes... I lost days, weeks to found some solutions without the need of intense post processing. ACES can be easy for some scenes but for my work it introduce many issues. I went out to make some photos using real cameras and recreating them in Octane using ACES. I compared colors by color picker, tried many things without success. The worst in ACES is how it treat low and low-end colors gamma. I have good calibrated monitor I can see low-end spectrum without problems. But Aces introduce that mid brightness is way too far from low ones also with color shift especially on blues. I have bad colors in shadows on contrasty scenes.

At the moment I'm very impressed with Sobotka's AGX Punchy version. But it needs more power from lighting - it is very good for creating natural bright scenes with great contrast.

[sethRichardson]

Ya but at that point, you have moved so far away from those models and what makes them realistic that getting good repeatable results as you would with a photographic approach is out the window.

Aces is overrated and for most artists just a plain bad idea. And you illustrated a very good reason as to why it's bad. It's not just those sky models either. It's blackbody lights, gaussian spectrum lights.... those all are incorrect in aces. You get a far better more real result out of a filmic ocio plain and simple.

Yes... I lost days, weeks to found some solutions without the need of intense post processing. ACES can be easy for some scenes but for my work it introduce many issues. I went out to make some photos using real cameras and recreating them in Octane using ACES. I compared colors by color picker, tried many things without success. The worst in ACES is how it treat low and low-end colors gamma. I have good calibrated monitor I can see low-end spectrum without problems. But Aces introduce that mid brightness is way too far from low ones also with color shift especially on blues. I have bad colors in shadows on contrasty scenes.

At the moment I'm very impressed with Sobotka's AGX Punchy version. But it needs more power from lighting - it is very good for creating natural bright scenes with great contrast.

That and if you ever work in the product design industry where you are creating product renders along with photographic assets with specific industry standard colors such as Pantone's, ral etc etc. You will NEVER match those colors in aces without having to run everything through a tedious post-production color pipeline where in a filmic pipeline those colors aren't getting destroyed.

The only place I see where aces makes sense is in large studio productions where they have teams of color artists doing post-work on 3d rendered footage and matching live sequence footage. Outside of that I encourage people to just not bother with it. Since Filmic gives what artists are after anyways.

[SSmolak]

I had the same issue in archviz render where client had problem to recognize wall brightness and color from RAL system because on strong sunlight and contrasty scene it was too bright on the front exposed directly to sunlight and very dark on shadow area. Reducing sunlight introduce underlighting under balconies and increasing sky power increase overall scene brightness not only on shadow area. Also it needs to rebuild vegetation materials that are sensitive for lighting. Also crazy colors in window reflections.

No way