Color Management Pipeline
Kredi Lab grades inside a full ACES 2.0 pipeline. Every frame from Final Cut Pro is converted into a scene-linear working space, graded there, and converted back out for display — so your grade behaves predictably regardless of the source footage or the delivery format.
How a frame flows
ACES Input Transform (IDT) — the incoming video frame (display-encoded, e.g. Rec.709) is converted into ACES scene-linear colour. Choose the IDT that matches your footage.
The grade — all fourteen stages run in order in the scene-linear ACEScg working space (the ACES AP1 wide-gamut primaries), where light behaves naturally and operations like exposure, tone and colour are physically sensible:
White Balance → Base → Tone → Clarity → Skin Refine → Creative Looks → Color Density → Camera Matrix → Color Wheels → Selective Color → Sharpness → Diffusion → Vignette → Grain.
Film Stock Look (ACES LMT) — an optional film-emulation look (Kodak, Fuji and Agfa stocks) applied as the final creative layer, just before output.
ACES Output Transform (ODT) — the graded scene-linear image is converted to your delivery format (SDR Rec.709, sRGB, P3, or HDR Rec.2020 PQ) and handed back to Final Cut Pro.
Why it matters
- Scene-referred grading — because the grade happens in linear light, tone and colour adjustments hold up across exposures and don’t break in highlights.
- One look, any delivery — switch the Output Transform to retarget the same grade from SDR to HDR without re-grading.
- Always on — colour management is the foundation the rest of the plugin is built on, so it can’t be switched off. If your footage is already graded or managed elsewhere, set the Input Transform to match what it actually is (e.g. Rec.709 (BT.1886) for display-ready material) and the pipeline passes it through faithfully.