Carol Payne
Founding Color Science Lead at Academy Software Foundation
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolCarol Payne is a Founding Color Science Lead and practitioner in color management, HDR imaging, and VFX/animation production workflows with a track record at Apple, Netflix, and Industrial Light & Magic. She designs and ships practical, organization-wide solutions—from scoping to production—making advanced color science accessible to diverse creative teams and delivery formats. An influential open-source leader, she chairs the OpenColorIO project and serves on the Academy Software Foundation’s Technical Advisory Committee, where she also co-founded the Diversity & Inclusion working group. Carol combines hands-on pipeline engineering (scene-referred color pipelines, HDR-first review systems, LED volume calibration) with program-building skills that scale across large-budget VFX and constrained marketing deliveries. Based in San Francisco, she’s available for full-time or contract roles and is known for turning complex, multidisciplinary problems into dependable, trust-building workflows.
5 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA), Film & Digital Media, Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA), Film & Digital Media at University of New Mexico
English
Github Skills (11)
tac10
visual-effects10
animation10
post-processing10
color-management10
gamut8
eagle7
encoding6
ancestry5
image-processing4
solace2
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
carolalynn/OpenColorIO
Aug 2020 - May 2024
A color management framework for visual effects and animation.
Contributions:1 PR, 29 pushes, 9 branches in 3 years 9 months
color-managementanimationvisual-effects
AcademySoftwareFoundation/ColorInterop
Apr 2024 - Mar 2025
Color Interop Forum
Contributions:1 review, 2 comments, 1 issue in 11 months
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