A pre-requisite for such a thing would be some way to describe target colours in a device-independent colour space, and Poser only supports RGB, HSL and HSV. It might be possible to do something with math nodes and I'm starting to build one, but it'll be a slow process as I'm learning as I go.

As part of this process, I've produced a ColorChecker prop (which should be familiar to photographers or broadcast TV pros): it loads with sRGB values by default, and there are MC6 materials to apply AdobeRGB values and a greyscale.

As I'm fortunate enough to have a display calibrated to AdobeRGB rather than sRGB, I've found that 'standard' settings for things like Gamma Correction don't quite work for me... the AdobeRGB checker was very useful for helping to get my settings right.

Making these MC6 files is tedious, and I check everything twice (you'd be surprised how many typing errors creep in), but I'll be producing additional MC6 files for AppleRGB and NTSC values, plus PAL if I can find the references.

If you don't know why you'd find these useful, you don't need them. Get them here.

I've spent a long time on Bruce Lindbloom's site to get these as right as possible, worth a look if you're into this sort of thing.

Poser's gamma correction is the simplified version, so it isn't even accurate sRGB conversion, technically. GC 2.2 and sRGB are only slightly different in bright colors, but very different in very dark colors.

As far as gamut goes, Poser calculates lighting and shading effects as linear, unbounded values, so there is not a problem with out-of-gamut values during calculation.

The final output, however, is clipped to 0..1 and either spit out as linear (which most people use and don't know how awful it is) or GC.

I have shown often how to do true sRGB in and out using shaders. More work, yes, but if that's what you want then that's what it takes.

It is also possible to perform any sort of output correction in Poser using my "artistic lens" prop. This is just a straight Refractor, IOR=1, mounted on a square. In its shader, the Refract node samples the scene and gives a linear value - which you can then manipulate to any color space you want.

You could also just post-work convert, although to avoid problems you'd want to work in EXR format, not JPG or similar.

Let's talk more about this. I'd like to hear more about what you're trying to do.

Quote - Poser's gamma correction is the simplified version, so it isn't even accurate sRGB conversion, technically. GC 2.2 and sRGB are only slightly different in bright colors, but very different in very dark colors.

Indeed, but any kind of GC is welcome; I discovered that, on my system, GC at 1.6 produced the most pleasing results. For some reason I feel that post-work on basics like levels, curves and colour balance is cheating - not because it's an easy way out, but that, like taking a photograph, it should be as right as possible out-of-the-box.

Linear output is exactly what's needed for the purposes of creating sample data for producing a color profile: that would be compared with the target values (which I can't get into Poser, yet) and the resulting profile used to apply gamma correction and gamut compression.

Well, I have a busy weekend lined up so I don't know if I'll be able to spend much time on this, but I need to look into your artistic lens (is that the same one for looking through walls?) to see what that can do.

I should have specified in the original post that the values have been set for D65 lighting with a 2° viewing angle.

if we export in EXR can we tthen make a render brighter like for example a camera does? you know when the room is dark and your brighten it up?

Quote - if we export in EXR can we tthen make a render brighter like for example a camera does? you know when the room is dark and your brighten it up?

This is the sensible option in PoserPro... I started this off with Poser 8 which doesn't have this feature.

I've spent some time thinking about this and, thanks to BB's input, I've come up with the solution.

Previously I'd been trying to get the values of existing, known reference targets into Poser. While that might be doable, it would be insanely complicated.

The trick is to create an entirely new set of reference values that I can relatively easily define within Poser with absolute accuracy (to 6 decimal points, anyway). I have the tools to create an ICC-compliant reference target and a method of getting those into Poser. I've had limited time to test it but so far everything's worked as expected.

Next I'll be giving some thought to the design of the target: since we're starting from scratch, it seems logical to optimise it for Poser. Rather than the 24-patch ColorChecker (above) I'll go for something with more like 128 patches.

I'm going to find an easier way of inputting the values - Excel probably - than via the material room, because that would be truly tedious.

Quote - I'm going to find an easier way of inputting the values - Excel probably - than via the material room, because that would be truly tedious.

We can't have tedium. How about a Matmatic script?