What is tone mapping and why does it matter? This is the topic of the latest Future Of podcast episode, diving into an area most people never think about—but see every day.
To unpack the topic, Mike Festa welcomes Emmett Lalish, an aerospace-engineer-turned-3D-rendering-expert whose journey spans rocket science, 3D printing, real-time rendering at Google, and now, cutting-edge work in VFX at Wētā FX in New Zealand.
It’s a conversation that starts with color science but quickly unfolds into a bigger story: about visual fidelity, simplifying complexity, and how one humble tool quietly improved the consistency of product visuals across the entire 3D commerce industry.
From Rocket Equations to Real-Time Rendering
“I guess just because my background is weird…” Emmett begins. And it is.
With a doctorate in control theory and a brain built for vector algebra, Emmett never set out to build rendering pipelines. But as the creative tech world expanded, his skills in solving hard, abstract problems found new purpose.
He led development on Model Viewer at Google — an open-source project designed to help anyone render 3D models on the web. There, his work began overlapping with real-time rendering engines like three.js and the needs of online retailers trying to showcase digital products.
That’s when tone mapping showed up. And not in a good way.
Wait, What Is Tone Mapping?
For the uninitiated, tone mapping is the invisible math behind how we see rendered images on our screens. It’s the function that compresses raw light values from a 3D renderer into the limited color range of your device’s display.
“If you turn tone mapping off, you’re not avoiding the problem—you’re just clamping it,” Emmett says. “And clamping is the most nonlinear thing you can do.”
In other words: without tone mapping, you end up with images that look wrong. Colors shift. Details get blown out. And, crucially for e-commerce, products don’t match what customers expect to receive.
The Wrong Colors for the Right Product
As Emmett explains, “In real-time 3D, we’re trying to show what the product is — not a stylized version of it. But we kept getting these weird results.”
Standard tone mapping approaches — like ACES, originally designed for film — were being used for everything, even product renders. The problem? “They weren’t made for that. They were made to make Dune look good.”
ACES, and its film-industry cousins, tend to desaturate colors for high dynamic range scenes — perfect for storytelling, but terrible for showing off the true color of a lipstick or sneaker. “What we needed was something simpler. Something neutral. Something honest.”
Solving a Problem Nobody Could Name
What followed was a deep dive into color perception, tone curves, and trade-offs — because, as Emmett emphasizes, “tone mapping is all about trade-offs.”
One of the hardest things to communicate was that even a simple change in tone mapping could make or break trust in digital commerce. “Marketers would say, ‘This yellow is wrong.’ Engineers would say, ‘Looks like yellow to me.’ But they were both right — just looking at different layers of the problem.”
This disconnect led Emmett to build what he called a “brain-dead simple tone mapper.” It prioritized visual consistency across devices, and more importantly, preserved the original intent of the artist or designer.
It was called PBR Neutral Tone Mapper. And it changed everything.
When Simplicity Wins
The tone mapper Emmett created wasn’t flashy. In fact, it was designed to do as little as possible — just enough to preserve hue and saturation, while gently guiding overly bright values into perceptual realism.
But its impact was huge.
Within weeks of launch, most major 3D viewers adopted it. “That kind of adoption, that fast? It was a career highlight,” Emmett reflects. “It hit a real pain point — and people could see the difference right away.”
And this wasn’t just theoretical. For companies comparing 3D models to product photos on the same webpage, the results were immediately useful. “People just want the model and the photo to look the same,” he says. “If they don’t, you lose trust — and customers.”
Making Render Comparisons That Actually Matter
Alongside the tone mapper, Emmett also maintained the Render Fidelity Comparison Tool, an open-source testbed that let developers compare how the same 3D asset looked across engines — like three.js, Filament, Babylon, and Blender.
This grid of visuals revealed more than just bugs. It showed biases in rendering engines, discrepancies in tone mapping, and subtle differences that mattered to real-world users.
“It made conversations better,” Emmett says. “Instead of saying, ‘My code is better,’ we’d say, ‘Here’s how my render compares to the path tracer. Let’s talk about that.’”
Why 3D Needs Fewer Rules and Better Defaults
Perhaps the biggest philosophical takeaway from Emmett’s work is this: most problems in 3D rendering aren’t about tech — they’re about assumptions.
Product photographers color grade by hand. 3D artists use physically based rendering. Marketers expect pixel-perfect output. But none of them share the same language or tools.
By introducing a neutral tone mapper and aligning expectations across disciplines, Emmett helped reduce noise in the pipeline — without sacrificing visual quality.
“You don’t want to tell an artist to tweak their base color just to fix tone mapping. That’s absurd,” he says. “It’s better to fix the tone mapping.”
The Future of Visual Fidelity Is Collaborative
As the conversation wraps, Emmett acknowledges the future will bring even more challenges: wider color gamuts, HDR displays, wearable devices. But the principle remains the same.
“There’s no such thing as a perfect tone mapper,” he says. “You’ll always have to choose your trade-offs. But the key is knowing what your priorities are — and designing tools that respect them.”
Whether you’re an engineer, a marketer, or a 3D artist, the message is clear: clarity and consistency beat complexity. Especially when you’re building trust in pixels.
And sometimes, the most transformative innovation isn’t adding more — it’s taking things away.
SuperDNA 3D Lab is a full-service 3D solutions provider. It creates 3D content, distributes it across various channels, and manages it in its own cloud servers for elevated eCommerce and other endpoints.
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