Scene-referred

Scene-referred means working with light values that represent the scene as it really was — the wide range of real-world brightness the camera captured — rather than values already squeezed to fit a display. A scene-referred framework like ACES keeps that full range intact through the grade, then an output transform maps it down to what a screen can show at the very end. This is the intuition behind why aggressive pushes in a managed wide space compress gracefully instead of clipping. The full contrast with display-referred grading is unpacked in Level 3.

First used in: 2.2 · Color management for real