Tonemapping
HDR → display-range remapping
Also known as: Tone mapping
Definition
Tonemapping is the final stage of the render pipeline that compresses the engine's internal high-dynamic-range (HDR) lighting calculations into the 0-1 colour range a display can actually show. Without tonemapping, bright lights would clip to pure white and dark areas to pure black. Different tonemappers (ACES, Reinhard, Filmic, AgX) produce different cinematic looks — choosing one is as much an art-direction call as a technical one.
In production
Unreal Engine 5 uses ACES by default and exposes a colour-grading panel (white balance, shadows/midtones/highlights wheels, and a tone curve) for fine-tuning inside the Post Process Volume. Blender 4.x ships with AgX as the default view transform, which preserves chroma better in highlights than the older Filmic tonemapper — a bright red light source stays visibly red instead of blowing out to white. Unity's HDRP offers both ACES and a custom "Neutral" tonemapper, and switching between them mid-project can shift every material's apparent value, which is why art directors lock the tonemapper choice early. Tonemapping also interacts with exposure: auto-exposure systems that adapt to scene brightness can cause visible "pumping" as the camera pans between a dark interior and a bright exterior, which some tonemapping setups mitigate with eye-adaptation speed curves.
Learn Tonemapping in
Tools that use Tonemapping
See also
HDRI
High Dynamic Range Image lighting
Volume (Post-Processing)
Unity post-processing and lighting overrides
Washed-Out Colors in Unity
Scene looks too bright, flat or too dark
Exposure
Overall brightness of the camera image
Color Grading
Final color and contrast look of the image
Color Management and ACES
Linear light, color spaces and view transforms