Digital Print Stock Design: A Framework for the Post-Film Era

For most of cinema history, the defining factor in the post-production “look” of captured imagery was the print stock. In addition to serving the technical function of transforming scene-referred imagery for display, print stocks were engineered to impart preferential color characteristics and selected by filmmakers based on these qualities. As the physical medium of the print stock has been retired from image mastering workflows, so too has the principle of a global creative transform. This is neither necessary nor beneficial. With the ongoing proliferation of camera and display standards, unifying the imagery of a given piece of content has become increasingly challenging. This has led to the development of systems that address the technical aspects of the challenge, most notably the Academy Color Encoding System (ACES). Such initiatives and their broad adoption demonstrate an industry-wide recognition that world-class color grading demands world-class engineering. Yet, in spite of this recognition, there exists no initiative aimed at supporting the creative aspects of unifying motion imagery at the macro-level. This article outlines the proposed framework for the design of digital print stocks (DPSs), composed of a set of manipulations whose parameters can be intuitively modified by artists, resulting in a global look that can be deployed within any imaging pipeline
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