How to import jpg textures without altering their color?

[fael097]

I'm on 3ds max 2025, and every time I import images for material textures, colors get all washed out. for example:

Left: 3ds max | Right: original image

How can I stop this behavior, without changing the color space of the whole scene? this is specially frustrating when you're using images as reference for modeling.

[cuneyt.ozdas]

Can you please record a short video showing how you import the images? Can you also post the screen capture of your current management settings when this happens (rendering menu/Color Management).

[fael097]

So any way I import textures, they end up the same washed out tone. I can drag a .jpg or .png file for example, into the viewport over a mesh, I can assign a new material, either physical or legacy standard and add a bitmap as diffuse color, turn on flat color on viewport display options, anything. nothing really changes the result. It's been like this for a few max versions, and when I update I always go back to default settings.

These are my settings, pretty much default:

[giuseppe.schiralli]

Can you open the bitmap and check if the rule is applied to it?
If not, switch back and forth between the 2 options Automatic/Color Space options.

[fael097]

I can choose any of the color spaces from that list, and the image will always be too bright or too dark.

the only way I got the image to display the correct colors is by selecting "unmanaged" color space:

[ads_delesdr]

Unfortunately, when doing a drag and drop of a bitmap to an object in the viewport, the bitmap is set to the ACEScg color space regardless of the appropriate rule found in the Color Management settings.

If you want to "neutralize" the bitmap, when it is loaded or reloaded in the material editor, choose "Data Image" at the bottom of the select bitmap dialog. It will set the color space to "Raw".

[fael097]

No. "raw" also does not work at all:

Setting color management to "unmanaged" (which obviously isn't a viable option) is the only way I got it working: 

[RGhost77]

It look like material with picture on plane has reflections. Did you drag and drop image to plane?

[fael097]

viewport shading set to flat color, not drag and dropped, image colorspace set to raw. doesn't work

[fael097]

So there's no way to make an existing image be displayed correctly when using OCIO/ACES?

[cuneyt.ozdas]

Hi,
Thanks for capturing the video and sharing it with us.
As mentioned above, it turned out that there is a bug where the incorrect color space was being assigned to the bitmap when the file is dragged and dropped. So please avoid d&d until we fix it.

Once the correct color space (sRGB in this case) is assigned to the bitmap, the only difference you'll get compared to an image viewing application will be the tone-mapping (aka. view transform) applied to the rendered scene image output. By default, the "ACES 1.0 SDR-video" view transform is applied to the render results (including the viewport rendering). Among other things this does a dynamic range compression to display high dynamic render result image in low dynamic range monitor, bringing details in the highlight etc. This will also change the mid-tones to open-up a room for the highlights, so probably the difference you're seeing is this one.

In your particular case, you're interested in replicating the texture space tones, not the rendering result, thus you're removing the lighting effects by picking flat shading. You also need to remove the tone-mapping: 
you can do that in the active viewport settings dialog, color management tab by selecting un-tone-mapped as the view transform for that viewport. Alternatively, you can change the default value that the viewports will use in the system color management settings. 

Let us if this works for you.

[fael097]

Hi, thank you for replying.

It works, but what I actually wanted is to set my reference images for modeling etc to un-tone-mapped, while keeping the other images such as model textures etc tone-mapped, since that's the correct representation for renders. the flat shading I can replicate per material by using a legacy standard shader and setting self-illumination to 100, but I didn't find a way to fix the tone mapping of a single material or texture.

Is this possible?

[cuneyt.ozdas]

Hi,
since everything is rendered and becomes a single image to be displayed, the only way to get the final colors identical to the bitmap's original colors for a single texture is applying the inverse of the display/view-transform before the texture is fed into the rendering pipeline. Currently we don't have any option to specify "inverse display/view-transform" for an input texture. Only place that's possible is for the viewport background image via the "Affects background" checkbox in viewport color management settings.

[WojtekOgrodnik]

Any news regarding this drag and drop bug? Looks like it's still there...