The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Science and Technology Council has released a new software technology designed to enable color transforms and other pixel-based operations in motion picture imaging pipelines. The Color Transformation Language, or “CTL,” a portable and platform-independent scripting language and interpreter, is intended to be used as a building block for color management systems as well as for sharing transforms in a common format

.CTL addresses an industry need to precisely and unambiguously describe and share color transforms that are routinely used in motion picture mastering. For example, transformations between various color spaces and film density encodings can be defined in a CTL program that can be delivered along with image data, thus ensuring the image is properly rendered for display or other processing steps.

CTL is available from the Academy under an open source license, and is a Registered Disclosure Document (RDD 15 -2007) published by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE). To access the CTL Software Developers Kit, please read and accept the following:

Color Transformation Language (CTL) Software License Agreement

Copyright © 2007 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (A.M.P.A.S.). Portions contributed by others as indicated. All rights reserved.

A worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive right to distribute, copy, modify, create derivatives, and use, in source and binary forms, is hereby granted, subject to acceptance of this license. Performance of any of the aforementioned acts indicates acceptance to be bound by the following terms and conditions:

Redistributions of source code, in whole or in part, must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the Disclaimer of Warranty.

Redistributions in binary form must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the Disclaimer of Warranty in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

Nothing in this license shall be deemed to grant any rights to trademarks, copyrights, patents, trade secrets or any other intellectual property of A.M.P.A.S. or any contributors, except as expressly stated herein. Neither the name “A.M.P.A.S.” nor the name of any other contributors to this software may be used to endorse or promote products derivative of or based on this software without express prior written permission of A.M.P.A.S. or the contributors, as appropriate.

This license shall be construed pursuant to the laws of the State of California, and any disputes related thereto shall be subject to the jurisdiction of the courts therein.