Back with another question about working with ACES/OCIO in Houdini.

Let's say sometimes I want to dot all my I's and cross all my T's and work in a proper ACES pipeline. This pipeline, as I understand it, requires a few extra steps to go from an ACES linear EXR (which seems to be what Karma most-wants to output) to an image I can share on the web (which is to say: in sRGB). I say this because I can do lookdev in the Karma viewport and make a picture that looks nice, then render to, say, png or jpg, and the resulting image looks different than what I see in the viewport; it looks more contrasty, highlights blow out more easily, etc. If I render to EXR, then step through a COP2 workflow where I manually do an OCIO transform to move my color from ACEScg to sRGB, I can get a png/jpg that matches what I see in the Karma viewport.

Sometimes, though, I'm trying to go fast, and don't necessarily care to take my image through a compositing step. I'm curious how I can get an output 8-bit jpg/png that matches what I see in the Karma viewport if I have OCIO enabled in Houdini? Just setting my output image type to jpg/png yields the higher-contrast 'wrong-looking' (or, at least, not-matching-the-viewport) images noted above.

I'm sure someone will point out I'm still not fully grasping this, and that's probably true!

dhemberg
Sometimes, though, I'm trying to go fast, and don't necessarily care to take my image through a compositing step. I'm curious how I can get an output 8-bit jpg/png that matches what I see in the Karma viewport if I have OCIO enabled in Houdini? Just setting my output image type to jpg/png yields the higher-contrast 'wrong-looking' (or, at least, not-matching-the-viewport) images noted above.

There's nothing yet built into Houdini for writing images with an ocio transform baked in, other than your COP workaround. There are command line utilities such as oiiotool/hoiiotool or ocioconvert that can do the job, but they're only 'quick' if you already know what you're doing with them.

That's not entirely true since karma does make it possible to apply an ocio colorspace to an image plane, but I consider it more trouble than its worth.