Building graphs

The Viewer

Channels, the pixel readout, view transforms, and viewer exposure and gamma that never touch your output.

The viewer is where you judge the picture, so it is built to tell you the truth about it rather than to make it look good. Everything on the bar under the image changes what you see and nothing on it changes what a node outputs, what you export, or what a downstream node receives.

Precision

A badge at the right of the bar reads float or 8-bit. Float means your graphics card is holding the image in high precision, so colour maths keeps its detail and values brighter than white survive instead of being clipped. 8-bit means the card refused the high-precision path and the viewer fell back. The picture still displays; it just has less headroom.

Most images you generate arrive as 8-bit files. Decoding them into float does not invent detail that was never there. What it buys you is that everything the viewer then does to them, and everything the graph will do to them as more of it moves onto the card, happens without a rounding step at each stage.

Channels

R G B isolate a single colour channel, A shows alpha, and Y shows luminance. Pressing the same key again returns to RGB, which is the behaviour a hand trained on Nuke already expects. Alpha is always available now, whether or not a mask is wired in, because the image carries a real alpha channel rather than a simulated one.

RGB view shows the colour channels as they are stored. It does not composite the image over the background using its alpha, so a picture with empty edges shows those edges as they really are instead of looking finished.

The pixel readout

Hover anywhere on the image and the bar reports the coordinate and the value under the pointer. That value is read from the image itself, before any of the display controls are applied, so exposure, gamma and the view transform never change it. That is the point of it: it answers what the pixel is, not what it currently looks like.

View transform

A monitor does not show raw values directly, so a transform is applied on the way to the screen. sRGB is the default and is the right answer almost always. Rec.709 is the broadcast curve, worth switching to only when judging a frame for a television delivery. Linear shows the numbers with no monitor curve at all, which looks far too dark on purpose and is how you catch a node working in the wrong space. The ACES option applies a filmic roll-off, and it does its real work on images that carry values above white rather than on an ordinary 8-bit source.

Each option explains itself on hover, and the control names out loud the three things it does not affect.

Exposure and gamma are view controls

The Look control holds a viewer exposure in stops and a viewer gamma. Use them to inspect: push two stops to see whether the shadows hold anything, pull back to check a highlight. They are not nodes, they do not enter the graph, and they change nothing you export.

Whenever either one is off its default the control renames itself to VIEW and shows the amount. That is deliberate. It is how you avoid approving a frame that only looks right because of a setting nobody else has.

The number beside each slider is its own control, and it is the one to use when a value has to be exact. Drag it left or right to scrub, hold Ctrl for a step ten times finer or Shift for ten times coarser, or click it once and type. A slider alone cannot land on 1.8 stops; typing can, and so can a fine drag.

To reset: double-click a slider, right-click a number, or use the reset beside them for both at once.

Zoom and pan

·The wheel zooms toward the pointer, so whatever is under the cursor stays under the cursor.
·1 puts one image pixel on one screen pixel. Above that ratio pixels are shown as hard squares rather than smoothed, so you can see the actual grid.
·F fits the image, H fills the panel, Home resets. The zoom percentage in the bar is a button: click it for 1:1.
·Zooming out averages the detail properly rather than dropping most of it, so a zoomed-out frame is worth trusting and fine texture does not crawl as you pan.

1 through 9 assign viewer slots when the node graph has focus, and 1 means 1:1 when the viewer does. Click the panel you mean first.

Sampling a colour into a node

Select a Color Picker node and a Pick button appears on the viewer bar. Click it, then click anywhere in the image, and that pixel becomes the node's colour. Escape cancels. The button is only there when such a node is selected, because that is the only place the value can go.

The value written is the sRGB hex of the pixel, regardless of the view transform you are looking through. A hex code is read as sRGB by every other tool, and it travels out of here into prompts and templates where nothing knows what your viewer was set to.

What it does not cover yet

The float path applies to stills. Video and 3D still use the older display route, so the channel keys, the readout and the look controls do not apply to them. There is no timeline, no frame numbers and no playhead anywhere in Studio yet, so a video node is a clip you preview rather than a sequence you can step through.