Colour management
DNA keeps every colour calculation in true, physically-linear light and only "develops" the picture into screen colours once, at the very end — so what you see is consistent, and what you export matches the canvas.
Why your colours look right
When you mix light, brighten a glow, or blend two layers, DNA does that maths in linear colour — the same way real light adds up. Most apps blend in the "squashed" colour your monitor shows, which makes bright edges look muddy and gradients band. DNA avoids that by working in linear behind the scenes and converting to your display only once, as the final step.
That final conversion is the display encode. Everything before it — lighting, layer blending, glows, volumes — stays in unbounded linear light, so highlights can go far brighter than white without being clipped early.
You don't have to think about any of this day to day. The defaults are set up to look good. This page is for when you want to change the look on purpose — switch the film look, work in a wider colour space, or send a true HDR signal to an HDR display.
Tone mapping: turning bright light into a picture
A scene can contain light far brighter than your screen can show (think the sun, a neon sign, a fireball). Tone mapping is the "film look" that gracefully rolls those bright values down into something your display can show, instead of clipping everything brilliant to flat white.
You pick the tone mapping operator (the View Transform) in your canvas settings. Choices:
ACES Filmic (default) — a punchy, cinematic curve. Cheapest and a safe everyday pick. Very saturated colours can shift hue slightly as they brighten.
ACES Fitted — a higher-fidelity version of the same look.
AgX — gentler on saturated colours, keeps hues honest as they get bright. The best pick for stylised work, neon, and fire.
Reinhard — a simple, classic roll-off. Light and old-school.
Uncharted 2 — a classic game-style filmic curve.
Standard — minimal contrast change; stays close to the colours you authored.
Untone-mapped — no roll-off at all (a passthrough, mostly for EXR export and debugging).
If bright neon or fire is shifting toward an odd hue with the default, try AgX. It was built to keep saturated colours looking like themselves as they get intense.
Working space
The working space is the "room" all your colour maths happens in. Two choices:
Linear sRGB (default) — great for everyday work. Covers the colours a normal screen can show.
ACEScg — a much wider space used in film and VFX. Choose this if you're working with very saturated lights, want better colour blending under intense lighting, or need to match a film pipeline.
When you switch to ACEScg, DNA automatically converts your materials and colours into the wider space before lighting, and carefully maps anything too saturated to show back down on the way out so it doesn't clip harshly. You don't manage any of that by hand.
HDR output and display gamuts
The display gamut is the final target your picture is encoded for — which range of colours and brightness gets sent to the screen or file.
sRGB / Rec.709 — standard screens. The normal default.
Display P3 / Rec.2020 — wider-gamut screens, for richer reds and greens.
Rec.2100 PQ / Rec.2100 HLG — true HDR output. If your display supports HDR, picking one of these tells DNA to send a real HDR signal, so highlights shine far brighter than normal white.
When you switch to an HDR gamut on a supported HDR monitor (macOS or Windows), DNA reconfigures the live viewport on the fly to send the HDR signal — no restart needed.
HDR is honest only when the whole chain supports it: an HDR-capable display, and an HDR-capable file format on export. If you export an HDR canvas to an 8-bit format like PNG, DNA falls back to standard sRGB tags and warns you — an 8-bit file can't carry HDR faithfully. For true HDR stills, use EXR; HDR video output is on the way.
What the canvas colour settings do
All of these knobs live on your canvas. In short:
Working space — the room your colour maths happens in (Linear sRGB or ACEScg).
View Transform — the film look / tone mapping curve.
Display gamut — the final colour + brightness target (standard, wide, or HDR).
Change any of them and the whole canvas updates live.
Screen and export match
DNA uses the exact same colour maths for the live viewport and for exported files, so your render matches the canvas. On export it also tags each file correctly — PNG, TIFF, video, and EXR all get the right colour metadata so other apps interpret them properly. EXR is special: it's saved as raw linear light with no display encode at all, so film and compositing apps colour-manage it themselves on the way in.