Synergy Color Management Component - SDK -  2018.0.80
SynColor Color Management Library

Autodesk Color Management, or SynColor, is a software component that provides state-of-the- art color management services. It has been designed as a reusable technology, and is shared across several Autodesk applications. Libraries are available for Linux, MacOS, and Windows, and there is also a Python binding.

SynColor is both fast and accurate. It is used by Autodesk Lustre for real-time color grading. A wide variety of integer and float pixel layouts are supported for input and output, but internal calculations are done at 32-bit float for high precision.

The SynColor API can apply color transforms on both the CPU and GPU. The CPU renderer takes advantage of SSE intrinsics, while the GPU renderer creates customized shader programs on-demand based on the color transform chain being applied. There are several methods of invoking GPU rendering, including via Autodesk OGS (One Graphics System). Supported shading languages are GLSL, Cg, and HLSL.

This single API provides access to many other official and industry standards for color management, including the Academy Color Encoding System (ACES), International Color Consortium (ICC) profiles, American Society of Cinematographers Color Decision Lists (ASC CDLs), OpenColorIO configurations, and over a dozen different third-party look-up table (LUT) formats.

SynColor also includes a library of over a hundred transforms for converting between common color spaces (including sRGB, AdobeRGB, ProPhotoRGB, ACES, CIE XYZ, digital cinema P3 and DCDM, as well as SD, HD, and UHD video).

The native color transform format for SynColor is CTF, which is based on the Academy/ASC XML color transform format with some Autodesk extensions. This format defines a superset of all color operations available in the other supported formats. Color transforms can be authored a flexible, human-readable XML format, and transform chains to be combined and losslessly exported.

The basic math operators in the CTF file format provide building blocks for assembling arbitrarily complex color transform chains. Each of the available operators maps onto a corresponding operator in the CPU and GPU renderers. There is also support for "dynamic parameters" which are designed to be fed into the rendering engines at runtime based on the settings of knobs or sliders in applications.

The CTF file format is documented here in the Autodesk Color Management guide.