Colour Management >

# Colour Management Workflow

Colour management works by applying colour transforms and other operations at various stages of the pipeline. Typically, you use colour management when:

- Importing clips. Images from different sources (such as digital cameras, scanned film, 3D renders, and matte paintings) often use different colour spaces and encodings, and they should be converted to a single working colour space.
- Outputting clips. Different output formats require different encodings depending on the medium and expected viewing conditions.

You might also want to apply colour transforms to convert into and out of a specific colour space in order to perform a particular operation. For example, operations like compositing or lens blur work best in a linear colour space, while operations like tracking and edge detection work best in video or log colour space.

In addition, colour management is used to display images in Smoke to ensure that the colours on the monitor and projector match what will be displayed on the final output as closely as possible. For example, if you are working in the ACES colour space, you can apply the ACES_to_graphics-monitor transform.