White text is light grey in color managed HDR-SDR

Hello,
I often work with HDR material and use YRGB color managed and colour processing mode ‘HDR’. This is the way it should be (HDR material simply looks better). The output color space must be SDR Rec 709. If I now add white text, whether fusion text or the very simple text, the white text is light grey. I think it's quite simple, but I haven't found it yet. So far I have simply increased the gain, but that can't be it. I view the whole thing on a normal Rec 709 monitor.
Maybe the workflow has to be different, but I actually want to use color management.
If anyone has a solution, I would be very grateful.
Thank you
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On the color page select the graphic file or text ( whatever you used), then right click > Bypass color management. This should solve the problem.

Try & let us know.
An older thread on same topic exist
viewtopic.php?f=21&t=148646

Or (because bypassing color management is buggy with layers) you can set the color space and gamma of the clip with grey text to indicate that it is already in the timeline color space and gamma so that no IDT is applied and then manually add a CST to convert it from RGB or Rec709 to your actual timeline color space / gamma...

HDR project settings

screenshot_91.jpg (36.59 KiB) Viewed 2191 times

In fusion CST applied

screenshot_90.jpg (277.58 KiB) Viewed 2191 times

I tried tracking the text (tried with the graphic too) in fusion which is in v19 color managed but it cant understand the output color space in spite of CST node applied in fusion when working in HDR project with HDR fooatge.

If I use the graphic without tracking within HDR project, on color page > bypass color management solves the problem but in fusion tracking I am not able to get white as white.

screenshot_89.jpg (264.21 KiB) Viewed 2191 times

Please refer to this post with almost the exact same title. It really went into detail about what has been going on.

viewtopic.php?f=21&t=148646

Short answer: White text in Fusion is generated in linear space with a value of 1.0 in each channel. Converting this linear value to the log working color space and because the color management applies tone mapping (mapping large values into a smaller range) at the end of the color pipeline, these values get mapped to a lower value resulting in grey text.

Fix: if you use the HDR preset, add a BrightnessContrast node after the text and set the Gain to 40.

Fix: if you use the HDR preset, add a BrightnessContrast node after the text and set the Gain to 40.

Thanks for the simple solution within Fusion I test with adding brightness node in fusion & it works perfect both with graphics & text.

screenshot_97.jpg (95.64 KiB) Viewed 2132 times

Thank you very much for all the answers.

Fusion is incompatible with the automatic color management added in V17. This is well documented as your experience is as expected

viewtopic.php?f=22&t=137485&p=745551&hilit=wide+Gamut#p745551

This is supposed to be fixed in V19. what version are you on?

This is supposed to be fixed in V19. what version are you on?

I thought it was too, but it seems to be in the same state as before for me. What did they actually do? It's still too annoying to make color management worth using when you have fusion compositions.

Screenshot 2024-10-22 at 7.32.15 PM.png (134.36 KiB) Viewed 1815 times

Still stuck bypassing color management any removing color management from tracks both inside and underneath it the fusion comp for another year.

I'm having the same problem still in version 19.1.2 in an HDR project.

All the posted workarounds, like setting the gain in a Brightness/Contrast node to a high value or fiddling around with CSTs work for me only partially. The text itself is bright white, but I would like to fade in the text on my merge node using the blend property. And instead of fading in smoothly over a second it will fade in over the first few frames and then there is no further real change for the remaining frames.

My current workaround is setting the Burn In in the Merge Node to 1.0. This gives a nice fade in, but now the text is a bit tranparent.

Any idea how this has to be setup correctly?

This is my composition:
https://1drv.ms/u/s!Aqng8CoLqI1Bl55agy4wB8yn2EJlPg?e=BoVJP8

And these are my color settings:

Bildschirmfoto 2025-01-27 um 03.36.08.png (565.53 KiB) Viewed 1376 times

If I remember correctly a second approach would be to leave the text brightness at 1 and then in the color page add a gamut mapping OFX going from 100nit input to 10000nit output. Let me know if that solved the blend animation.

@Sven, I don't get that to work at all:

I have used a Channel Boolean node and filled the Alpha channel from the red channel. As my text is white, every source channel should work. I have connected the Channel Boolean to a second Media Out.
Now, my first Media Out is just the original footage and the second Media Out contains the tracked Text with an Alpha mask that filters only to the text.

I have added a second input in the Color page, connected a Corrector node with the Gamut Mapping Effect and map fromm 100nits to 203nits. Additionally, the second input goes to the alpha input of the Gamut Mapping Node.
Afterwards, I try to combine the Gamut Mapping node to the end of my regular node tree, which somehow doesn't work as expected. I have tried both a Layer Mixer Node and a Parallel Mixer Node but I always get the white text on a black background without the original footage.
Also, the blend in goes from 0 to 100% in one frame.

So, I guess I will have to live with the Burn In which isn't that bad as it even let some of the background texture shine through.

Another option could be to copy my composition to another track and render the tracked text on a black background. Then everything seems to work as expected and I could blend in the tracked text like a regular title.

@Sven, I don't get that to work at all

Here's a quick walkthrough how to set it up. This is actually more elegant than adding the BrightnessContrast node I described earlier. Since the project settings are set to DISABLE "Use inverse DRT for SDR to HDR conversion" you have to add this inverse DRT manually. The simplest approach is with the Gamut Mapping OFX. If the setting was ENABLED, Resolve would do the exact same thing in the background.

@Sven H, thanks for taking the time to put together the setup.

Finally, I have found the problem in my setup:
I use a fixed node tree on the Color page. The first node and my last 4 nodes are disabled by default, because they are only used in some specific cases, e.g. Noise Reduction.

On the Fusion page I have two media out nodes:
1. The original footage is directly connected to Media out 1.
2. Text and some lines are tracked and merged over a transparent Background node. The merge node blend property is animated with keyframes. The whole setup is connected to Media out 2.

On the Color page I have connected the first source node to the first active node.
The second source node is connected to the Gamut Mapping and also to the Alpha channel of the Gamut Mapping.
Everything is connected using a Layer Mixer node at the end (again connected to the active nodes).

Fusion Setup.jpg (554.89 KiB) Viewed 1005 times

Color Page.jpg (528.7 KiB) Viewed 1005 times

At least, it is solved for me.