Customizing Available Colour Spaces

By default, Harmony supports a handful of commonly used colour spaces. If your production uses a colour space that is not supported by Harmony out of the box, it is possible to customize the colour spaces supported by Harmony to suit your production’s needs.

The colour spaces supported by Harmony are stored in files in the following location:

• Windows: C:\Program Files (x86)\Toon Boom Animation\Toon Boom Harmony 21 Premium\etc\colourmanagement
• macOS: /Applications/Toon Boom Harmony 21 Premium/Harmony Premium.app/Contents/tba/etc/colourmanagement
• GNU/Linux: /usr/local/ToonBoomAnimation/harmonyPremium_21/etc/colourmanagement

In this directory, you will find the following contents:

Name	Type	Purpose
config.ocio	OpenColorIO configuration file	The configuration file that contains the colour profile definitions used by Harmony.
luts	Directory	A directory containing some dependency files used by the colour profiles defined in config.ocio.
icc	Directory	A directory containing ICC profiles matching the colour spaces defined in config.ocio.

Just like many other software that support colour space management, Harmony uses the OpenColorIO colour management technology to define its supported colour spaces. If the other software used by your production also uses OpenColorIO, this means you can easily use the OpenColourIO configuration you use with your other software with Harmony so as to use the same colour space definitions across your production.

You can customize the colour space definitions used by Harmony by setting the OCIO environment variable for your operating system to the full path of your own, custom config.ocio file. This allows you to use the same .ocio file for multiple software if needed.

You might notice that, along with the OpenColorIO configuration files, there is a directory containing ICC colour profiles. The ICC colour profiles are only used to tag exported images when supported and movies when using QuickTime Movie (*.mov) format on macOS, and are not required for any other part of the colour management in Harmony.

Hence, if you decide to customize the colour space definitions used by Harmony, you can include the ICC colour profiles for your colour space definitions if you want. If you don’t, Harmony will still render your images and movies in the appropriate colour spaces with the appropriate colour values, but will not be able to tag your exported images and movies with their colour space information.

For Harmony to be able to use an ICC colour profile to tag exported images and movies, the following conditions must be met:

• The ICC colour profiles must be located in an icc sub-directory, in the same directory as config.ocio.
• The file name of the ICC colour profile must match the name of the colour space as defined in config.ocio.

For example, if your config.ocio file contains a colour space definition named sRGBf, for Harmony to be able to tag exported movies (on macOS) and images with this colour space, then the directory containing your config.ocio file should also contain a directory named icc, which would in turn contain a corresponding colour profile for sRGBf named sRGBf.icc.