Installation

Installation may be done either by installing pre-built binaries from various package managers or by building from source. (The OCIO project currently does not provide pre-built libraries as downloadable artifacts other than through package managers.)

Please note that the version available through a given package manager may be significantly outdated when compared to the current official OCIO release, so please verify the version you install is current. (Unfortunately, even two years after the introduction of OpenColorIO v2, several package managers continue to install OCIO 1.1.1.)

Alternatives

Python

If you only need the Python binding, the simplest solution is to take advantage of the pre-built wheels in the Python Package Index (PyPI) here. It can be installed as follows, once you have Python installed.

PyPI:

pip install opencolorio

The pre-built wheels are listed here. Note that source code is provided, so it may be possible for pip to compile the binding on your machine if the matrix of Python version and platform version does not have the combination you need. More detailed instructions are available for how to use pip.

OpenImageIO

If you only need to apply color conversions to images, please note that OpenImageIO’s oiiotool has most of the functionality of the ocioconvert command-line tool (although not everything, such as GPU processing). OpenImageIO is available via several package managers (including Homebrew and Vcpkg).

Homebrew:

brew install openimageio

Vcpkg:

vcpkg install openimageio[opencolorio,tools]:x64-windows --recurse

Installing OpenColorIO using Package Managers

Linux

When it comes to Linux distributions, relatively few of the Linux distribution repositories have been updated to OCIO v2. The latest Fedora is one good option as it offers a recent release of OpenColorIO v2. Information about the package can be found on the Fedora project website.

For the other distributions, information about which release of OpenColorIO is available can be verified on pkgs.org.

The recommendation is to build OpenColorIO from source. You may build from source using the instructions below. See Building from Source.

Windows using Vcpkg

Vcpkg can be used to install OpenColorIO on Windows 7 or higher. To do that, Vcpkg must be installed by following the official instructions. Once Vcpkg is installed, OpenColorIO and some of the tools can be installed with the following command:

vcpkg install opencolorio[tools]:x64-windows

Note that this package does not install ocioconvert, ociodisplay, ociolutimage, and the Python binding.

If you need the extra command-line tools, you’ll need to install from source. However, the Python binding can be installed as described in the Python section.

MacOS using Homebrew

You can use the Homebrew package manager to install OpenColorIO on macOS.

First install Homebrew as per the instructions on the Homebrew homepage (or see the Homebrew documentation for more detailed instructions).

Then simply run the following command to install:

brew install opencolorio

Homebrew does not install the Python binding or the command-line tools that depend on either OpenImageIO or OpenEXR such as ocioconvert, ociodisplay, and ociolutimage.

Building from Source

The basic requirements to build OCIO from source on Linux, macOS, and Windows are a supported C++ compiler, CMake, and an internet connection. The OCIO Cmake scripts are able to download, build, and install all other required components. However, more advanced users are also able to have the build use their own version of dependencies.

Dependencies

OCIO depends on the following components. By default, the OCIO CMake scripts will download and build the items labelled with a *, so it is not necessary to install those items manually:

Required components:

• C++ 11-17 compiler (gcc, clang, msvc)

• CMake >= 3.13

• *Expat >= 2.4.1 (XML parser for CDL/CLF/CTF)

• *yaml-cpp >= 0.7.0 (YAML parser for Configs)

• *Imath >= 3.0 (for half domain LUTs)

• *pystring >= 1.1.3

• *minizip-ng >= 3.0.7 (for config archiving)

• *ZLIB >= 1.2.13 (for config archiving)

Optional OCIO functionality also depends on:

• *Little CMS >= 2.2 (for ociobakelut ICC profile baking)

• *OpenGL GLUT & GLEW (for ociodisplay)

• *OpenEXR >= 3.0 (for apps including ocioconvert)

• OpenImageIO >= 2.1.9 (for apps including ocioconvert)

• *OpenFX >= 1.4 (for the OpenFX plug-ins)

• OpenShadingLanguage >= 1.11 (for the OSL unit tests)

• Doxygen (for the docs)

• NumPy (optionally used in the Python test suite)

• *pybind11 >= 2.9.2 (for the Python binding)

• Python >= 2.7 (for the Python binding only)

• Python 3.7 - 3.9 (for building the documentation)

Building the documentation requires the following packages, available via PyPI:

• Sphinx

• six

• testresources

• recommonmark

• sphinx-press-theme

• sphinx-tabs

• breathe

Example bash scripts are provided in share/ci/scripts for installing some dependencies. These are used by OpenColorIO CI so are regularly tested on their noted platforms. The install_docs_env.sh script will install all dependencies for building OCIO documentation and is available for all supported platforms. Use GitBash (provided with Git for Windows) to execute this script on Windows.

Automated Installation

Dependencies listed above with a preceeding * can be automatically installed at build time using the OCIO_INSTALL_EXT_PACKAGES option in your cmake command (requires an internet connection). The C/C++ libraries are pulled from external repositories, built, and are (typically) statically-linked into an OCIO dynamic library. All installs of these components are fully contained within your build directory.

Three OCIO_INSTALL_EXT_PACKAGES options are available:

cmake -DOCIO_INSTALL_EXT_PACKAGES=<NONE|MISSING|ALL>

• NONE: Use system installed packages. Fail if any are missing or don’t meet minimum version requirements.

• MISSING (default): Prefer system installed packages. Install any that are not found or don’t meet minimum version requirements.

• ALL: Install all required packages, regardless of availability on the current system.

Existing Install Hints

If the library is not installed in a typical location where CMake will find it, you may specify the location using one of the following methods:

• Set -D<package_name>_DIR to point to the directory containing the CMake configuration file for the package.

• Set -D<package_name>_ROOT to point to the directory containing the lib and include directories.

• Set -D<package_name>_LIBRARY and -D<package_name>_INCLUDE_DIR to point to the lib and include directories.

Not all packages support all of the above options. Please refer the OCIO CMake find modules for the package that you are having trouble with to see the options it supports.

Usually CMake will use the dynamic library rather than static, if both are present. In this case, you may set <package_name>_STATIC_LIBRARY to ON to request use of the static one. If only the static library is present (such as when OCIO builds the dependency), then the option is not needed. The following packages support this option: expat, yaml-cpp, Imath, lcms2, and minizip-ng. Using CMake 3.24+, it is possible to prefer the static version of ZLIB with -DZLIB_USE_STATIC_LIBS=ON.

The package names used by OCIO are as follows (note that these are case-sensitive):

Required:

• expat

• yaml-cpp

• Imath

• pystring

• ZLIB

• minizip-ng

Optional:

• OpenEXR

• OpenImageIO

• lcms2

• pybind11

• openfx

• OSL

• Sphinx

• GLEW

• GLUT

• Python

Please note that if you provide your own minizip-ng, rather than having OCIO’s CMake download and build it, you will likely need to set its CMake variables the same way that OCIO does (e.g., enable ZLib and turn off most other options). Using a minizip-ng from various package managers (e.g., Homebrew) probably won’t work. Please see the settings that begin with -DMZ_ that are used in the OCIO minizip-ng find module.

Please note that if you build a static OCIO library, it will not contain the libraries for the external packages and so you will need to list those separately when linking your client application. If you had OCIO download and build these packages, you will find them under your build directory in ext/dist/lib. The libraries that are needed are: expat, yaml-cpp, Imath, pystring, ZLIB, and minizip-ng.

The OCIO make install step will install CMake configuration files that may be used by applications that consume OCIO to find and utilize OCIO during their own build process.

For the Python packages required for the documentation, ensure that their locations are in your PYTHONPATH environment variable prior to configuring the build.

This custom variable is also available:

• -DPython_EXECUTABLE=<path> (Python executable for pybind11)

Enabling optional components

CMake Options

There are many options available in CMake.

Several of the most common ones are:

• -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release (Set to Debug, if necessary)

• -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON (Set to OFF to build OCIO as a static library)

Here are the most common OCIO-specific CMake options (the default values are shown):

• -DOCIO_BUILD_APPS=ON (Set to OFF to not build command-line tools)

• -DOCIO_USE_OIIO_FOR_APPS=OFF (Set ON to build tools with OpenImageIO rather than OpenEXR)

• -DOCIO_BUILD_PYTHON=ON (Set to OFF to not build the Python binding)

• -DOCIO_BUILD_OPENFX=OFF (Set to ON to build the OpenFX plug-ins)

• -DOCIO_USE_SSE=ON (Set to OFF to turn off SSE CPU performance optimizations)

• -DOCIO_BUILD_TESTS=ON (Set to OFF to not build the unit tests)

• -DOCIO_BUILD_GPU_TESTS=ON (Set to OFF to not build the GPU unit tests)

• -DOCIO_USE_HEADLESS=OFF (Set to ON to do headless GPU reendering)

• -DOCIO_WARNING_AS_ERROR=ON (Set to OFF to turn off warnings as errors)

• -DOCIO_BUILD_DOCS=OFF (Set to ON to build the documentation)

• -DOCIO_BUILD_FROZEN_DOCS=OFF (Set to ON to update the Python documentation)

Several command-line tools (such as ocioconvert) require reading or writing image files. If OCIO_USE_OIIO_FOR_APPS=OFF, these will be built using OpenEXR rather than OpenImageIO and therefore you will be limited to using OpenEXR files with these tools rather than the wider range of image file formats supported by OIIO. (Using OpenEXR for these tools works around the issue of a circular dependency between OCIO and OIIO that can complicate some build chains.)

The CMake output prints information regarding which image library will be used for the command-line tools (as well as a lot of other info about the build configuration).

Documentation

Instructions for installing the documentation pre-requisites and building the docs are in the section on contributing documentation.

MacOS and Linux

While there is a huge range of possible setups, the following steps should work on macOS and most Linux distros. To keep things simple, this guide will use the following example paths - these will almost definitely be different for you:

• source code: /source/ocio

• the temporary build location: /tmp/ociobuild

• the final install directory: /software/ocio

First make the build directory and cd to it:

$ mkdir /tmp/ociobuild
$ cd /tmp/ociobuild

Next step is to run cmake, which looks for things such as the compiler’s required arguments, optional requirements like Python, OpenImageIO etc

For this example we will show how to install OCIO to a custom location (instead of the default /usr/local), we will thus run cmake with CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX.

Still in /tmp/ociobuild, run:

$ cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/software/ocio /source/ocio

The last argument is the location of the OCIO source code (containing the main CMakeLists.txt file). You should see it conclude with something along the lines of:

-- Configuring done
-- Generating done
-- Build files have been written to: /tmp/ociobuild

Next, build everything (with the -j flag to build using 8 threads):

$ make -j8

Starting with CMake 3.12, you can instead run a portable parallel build:

$ cmake --build . -j 8

This should complete in a few minutes. Finally, install the files into the specified location:

$ make install

If nothing went wrong, /software/ocio should look something like this (on Linux or macOS):

$ cd /software/ocio
$ ls
bin/  include/  lib/  share/
$ ls bin/
ociobakelut ociocheck  (and others ...)
$ ls include/
OpenColorIO/
$ ls lib/
cmake/  libOpenColorIO.dylib  (and some more specific versions ...)
libOpenColorIOimageioapphelpers.a  libOpenColorIOoglapphelpers.a
pkgconfig/  python<version>/
$ ls lib/pkgconfig
OpenColorIO.pc
$ ls lib/python<version>/site-packages
PyOpenColorIO.so
$ ls share/ocio
setup_ocio.sh

Windows

While build environments may vary between users, the recommended way to build OCIO from source on Windows 7 or newer is to use the scripts provided in the Windows share section of the OCIO repository. There are two scripts currently available.

The first script is called ocio_deps.bat and it provides some automation to install the most difficult dependencies. Those dependencies are:

• Vcpkg

• OpenImageIO

• Freeglut

• Glew

• Python dependencies for documentation

Run this command to execute the ocio_deps.bat script:

ocio_deps.bat --vcpkg <path to current vcpkg installation or where it should be installed>

The second script is called ocio.bat and it provide a way to configure and build OCIO from source. Moreover, this script executes the install step of cmake as well as the unit tests. The main use case is the following:

ocio.bat --b <path to build folder> --i <path to install folder>
--vcpkg <path to vcpkg installation> --ocio <path to ocio repository> --type Release

For more information, please look at each script’s documentation:

ocio.bat --help

ocio_deps.bat --help

Quick environment configuration

The quickest way to set the required Environment variables is to source the share/ocio/setup_ocio.sh script installed with OCIO. On Windows, use the corresponding setup_ocio.bat file. See OCIO’s install directory under share/ocio.

For a temporary configuration of your terminal, you can run the following script:

# Windows - Execute setup_ocio.bat
[... path to OCIO install directory]/share/ocio/setup_ocio.bat
# Unix - Execute setup_ocio.sh
[... path to OCIO install directory]\share\ocio\setup_ocio.sh

For a more permanent option, add the following to ~/.bashrc (assuming you are using bash, and the example install directory of /software/ocio):

source /software/ocio/share/ocio/setup_ocio.sh

The only environment variable you must configure manually is OCIO, which points to the configuration file you wish to use. For prebuilt config files, see the Downloads section

To do this, you would add a line to ~/.bashrc (or a per-project configuration script etc), for example:

export OCIO="/path/to/my/config.ocio"

Environment variables

Note: For other user facing environment variables, see Environment Variables.

OCIO

This variable needs to point to the global OCIO config file, e.g config.ocio

DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH (macOS)

The lib/ folder (containing libOpenColorIO.dylib) must be on the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH search path, or you will get an error similar to:

dlopen(.../OCIOColorSpace.so, 2): Library not loaded: libOpenColorIO.dylib
Referenced from: .../OCIOColorSpace.so
Reason: image not found

This applies to anything that links against OCIO, including the PyOpenColorIO Python binding.

LD_LIBRARY_PATH (Linux)

The Linux equivalent of the macOS DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH.

PYTHONPATH

Python’s module search path. If you are using the PyOpenColorIO module, you must add lib/python2.x to this search path (e.g python/2.5), or importing the module will fail:

>>> import PyOpenColorIO
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named PyOpenColorIO

Note that DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH or LD_LIBRARY_PATH must be set correctly for the module to work.

OFX_PLUGIN_PATH

When building the OCIO OpenFX plugins, include the installed OpenColorIO/lib directory (where OpenColorIO.ofx.bundle is located) in this path.

It is recommended to build OFX plugins in static mode (BUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF) to avoid any issue loading the OpenColorIO library from the plugin once it has been moved. Otherwise, please make sure the shared OpenColorIO lib (*.so, *.dll, *.dylib) is visible from the plugin by mean of PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH or DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH for Windows, Linux and macOS respectively. For systems that supports it, it is also possible to edit the RPATH of the plugin to add the location of the shared OpenColorIO lib.