What is ACES 2? ============ ACES 2 is the second major release of the ACES (Academy Color Encoding System) framework and focuses on delivering a more complete and consistent end-to-end color management solution. What’s New in ACES 2 -------------------- The most significant change in ACES 2 is the introduction of a completely redesigned suite of rendering transforms. However, ACES 2 introduces a number of important improvements and additions, including: - New [**Output Transforms**](./about-rendering.md) for rendering ACES images to displays, featuring: - A less aggressive tone scale with reduced mid-tone contrast and a gentler highlight rolloff - More intuitive parameter controls for supporting custom or uncommon display configurations - Robust gamut mapping for improved perceptual uniformity and reduced clipping artifacts - Optimized performance for inverse transforms - Additional transforms with preset parameters targeting common display calibration standards - Enhanced [**AMF (ACES Metadata File) Specification**](../amf/specification/index.md) - Updated specification of [**ACES Transform IDs**](../system-components/transform-id-spec.md), plus a manifest of Transform IDs available at each ACES version tag since v1.0 - Recommendations for using compression in **ACES OpenEXRs** - New [**Recommendations**](../system-components/input-transforms/capture-guide.md) for generating Input Transforms for prosumer-level cameras - New [**Tools**](https://beta.devtools.acescentral.com/) for generating Input Transforms - Expanded **Documentation** across all components, with plans for continued additions to add clarity of intended behavior, user guides, document recommended workflows, as well as a history of the discussions and reasoning for various design decisions The ACES 2 feature set was developed in direct response to the [top feature requests and user feedback from ACES 1 users](./v1-feedback.md).