Overview

OpenColorIO (OCIO) is a complete color management solution geared towards motion picture production with an emphasis on visual effects and computer animation. OCIO provides a straightforward and consistent user experience across all supporting applications while allowing for sophisticated back-end configuration options suitable for high-end production usage. OCIO is compatible with the Academy Color Encoding Specification (ACES) and is LUT-format agnostic, supporting many popular formats.

OpenColorIO version 1.0 was released in 2011, having been in development since 2003. OCIO v1 represented the culmination of years of production experience earned on such films as SpiderMan 2 (2004), Surf’s Up (2007), Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009), Alice in Wonderland (2010), and many more.

OpenColorIO v2 was in development from 2017 to 2020 and was feature complete as of SIGGRAPH 2020. After a stabilization and bug-fixing period, an official 2.0.0 release was made in January 2021. Development has continued to be active since then with the 2.1 release in 2021, the 2.2 release in 2022, and the 2.3 release in 2023 adding even more capabilities. Here is more information about our Releases.

About the Documentation

The documentation has been updated to include basic coverage of the new OCIO v2 features but additional work is needed to provide more detail and tutorials about how to best leverage them. We have an OCIO User Experience (UX) working group that is gradually working on more coverage.

The documentation is a work-in-progress and we would love to have your help to improve it! An easy way to get involved is to join the #docs or #ux channel on Slack.

Accessing Other Versions

You are reading the documentation for OCIO v2. The documentation for the earlier 1.x series of releases is available here.

Community

Mailing Lists

There are two mailing lists associated with OpenColorIO:

ocio-user@lists.aswf.io

For end users (artists, often) interested in OCIO profile design, facility color management, and workflow.

ocio-dev@lists.aswf.io

For developers interested OCIO APIs, code integration, compilation, etc.

Slack

There is an OpenColorIO Slack workspace at: https://opencolorio.slack.com.

New users may join the workspace from here.