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Color Management

caution

Color Management is 'opt in' and currently considered a technical preview.

Intro​

Color management ensures designs look consistent across different devices and export formats. Cavalry uses a pipeline approach where colors flow through distinct stages.

Color management can be enabled via Preferences or overridden per-project via Project Settings. It can also be enabled/disabled via the Viewport Settings.

What "Disabled" Actually Means

When Color Management is disabled, Cavalry still performs color operations — it simply uses sRGB for both the Working Space and Viewport Display Color Space. This is equivalent to enabling Color Management, setting the Working Color Space to sRGB and setting the Viewport's Display Color Space to sRGB meaning that even with color management disabled, colors remain predictable.

Working Color Space​

The Working Color Space determines the color space used for all internal rendering operations — blending, anti-aliasing, gradients, and compositing.

What Color Management does not affect:

  • Colors are always entered or color picked in sRGB.
  • Colors are always stored with the Scene (.cv) in sRGB.
  • The final appearance of flat, solid colors is unaffected.

Viewport Display Color Space​

The Viewport's Display Color Space controls how a Composition is displayed on screen. This is a preview transform that converts from the Working Space to a target display profile.

Color Wheel Appearance​

The Viewport's Display Color Space intentionally affects how the color wheel appears so that the available color range for the target display is shown when picking colors.

Rendering​

The formats below are automatically embedded with the working color space for rendering. This ensures any exports display correctly in other applications:

  • PNG
  • JPEG
  • WebP
  • Quicktime
  • WebM
  • MP4

Assets​

All image/video assets and renders will be color managed with the exception of GIF, SVG and Lottie which all convert to sRGB regardless of the working space.

This is set automatically based on the color profile of the asset but can be overridden by right clicking on an asset in the Assets window and choosing Color Settings.... This will open a new window with the following options:

Interpret As - Select a color profile to override the detected color profile.

When to use:

  • When the footage has no embedded profile.
  • When the embedded profile is incorrect.
  • When footage has been shot in a different color space and needs to be reinterpreted.

Linearise - Replace the transfer function with linear (gamma 1.0) while keeping the color gamut.

Preserve RGB - When checked, color management is bypassed and raw RGB values pass through without conversion.

When to use:

  • Where brightness values from assets are being sampled by other Layers like the Image Sampler.

FAQ​

Why are colors stored as sRGB?​

This is a current limitation but support for a wider range of gamuts is planned for the future.

GIF/Lottie export looks different. Why?​

These web formats are always converted to sRGB regardless of the Working Color Space.

Gamma 2.4 and Rec.709​

  • Rec.709 is the camera encoding standard.
  • Gamma 2.4 (BT.1886) is the display standard for broadcast monitors.

Cavalry uses Gamma 2.4 for display when content is tagged as Rec.709. This can be overridden via the Asset's Color Settings....