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Capture One or LR6?

jng

Well-known member
I can make you a DNG profile in five minutes if I just get a raw file with a CC24 shot in your preferred light, something similar to D50 is a good all-around light. Minimized glare, and even light, minimized perspective distortion of the target, and I need to know if the colorchecker was made before or after november 2014. A colorchecker passport is okay too.

Making a C1 icc profile is a bit messier, but you can make a quick test in LR first to see if you like the result, and if so we can make a C1 ICC later.
Anders,

Thanks for your generous offer! PM sent...

John
 

tjv

Active member
That's a very generous off, thank Anders.
I'll need to get my hands on a target first... I think I have a passport mini X-Rite target somewhere...
Thanks again,
T

I can make you a DNG profile in five minutes if I just get a raw file with a CC24 shot in your preferred light, something similar to D50 is a good all-around light. Minimized glare, and even light, minimized perspective distortion of the target, and I need to know if the colorchecker was made before or after november 2014. A colorchecker passport is okay too.

Making a C1 icc profile is a bit messier, but you can make a quick test in LR first to see if you like the result, and if so we can make a C1 ICC later.

Making a basic DCamProf profile is not that difficult, but if it's the first time you use the command line it can look a bit scary. The "easy way" to make a DNG profile is described here: Making a camera profile with DCamProf and there's a corresponding section for Capture One.

Currently I only provide source code, but builds of the DCamProf program for mac and windows can be found in the Lula DCamProf thread, OSX link OSX lula message and Windows link Win lula message
 

torger

Active member
Here's quick-and-dirty IQ160 profiles made from John's D65 shot. I got two shots but I didn't make it dual illuminant now to save time. It's better if you have a look and see if it's worth working on first.

IQ160 neutral
IQ160 neutral+
IQ160 no curve

The contrast curve is Adobe's default curve. For a more serious profile one may want to match it to the C1 (native) curve instead of using ACR default, but that curve is not bad either.

Neutral is a neutral rendering, neutral+ is almost the same but some subjective adjustments, and nocurve is the flat one without contrast curve, ie "reproduction style". The profiles are quite relaxed in patch matching to focus on smoothness.

I'm travelling so I actually don't have LR at hand, so I make these "in the blind", but it should work. Let me know if there are problems.

Where to install the profiles? For Adobe Lightroom / Camera Raw: Microsoft Windows: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\ Roaming\Adobe\CameraRaw\CameraProfiles, and Apple OS X: /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/CameraProfiles/. These are hidden directories so you may need to make some trick to make them show (don’t make me google it for you). You must restart Lightroom for it to detect new files.
 

torger

Active member
The "no curve" profile is good for diagnostics, it shows what colors DCamProf thinks the camera sees. If colors are plain wrong there, there's some issue with the target shot or target matching. The profiles with curve start with the "no curve" base profile but has then applied lots of perceptual adaptations due to the contrast increase so it's not about colorimetric accuracy any longer, but "global realism", that is if you look at a complete image at once it should look to have a contrast and saturation/hues that look realistic, not too much and not too little.
 

jng

Well-known member
I did 6 conversions of the same IQ160 file I showed earlier in this thread, using either ACR (whatever the latest version is on CC) and C1 (v9.1):

ACR w/Adobe standard profile
ACR w/dual illuminant profile made in Adobe DNG Profile Editor
ACR w/DCamProf neutral profile
ACR w/DCamProf neutral+ profile
ACR w/DCamProf no curve profile
C1 v9.1 w/IQ160 outdoor daylight profile

Each seems to have its own merits depending on what's in the file and the look that's desired. Clearly, each profile uses its own special sauce, with "no curves" being (intentionally) the equivalent of a bland, spice-free diet.

Per Anders' suggestion, I made a .psd file with one layer for each conversion, so it's possible to click between the different layers to do direct "A-B" comparisons. For those who are interested, a downsized file can be found on Dropbox:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ao4g6wrxouj3y3z/AADPYZA7Ltu2BTfnQdlRPcXva?dl=0

The only adjustments I made for the conversions was color balancing against a grey card and exposure adjustment (same for all).

Thanks very much to Anders for doing this!

John
 
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RVB

Member
Probably due my inexperience with C1 I am having similar problems, but with my XF+100. I must change over to Prophoto which LR uses as the default color space since the Adobe RGB color space is just too small a bucket. I truly find it amazing that C1 uses that color space as a default.
"I truly find it amazing that C1 uses that color space as a default." Isn't the color space based on the chosen profile in the output recipe?

I think you can also change it in the "View" section under "proof profiles".. screen grab attached.

Screen Shot 2016-07-25 at 01.53.17.jpg
 

Pradeep

Member
Interesting thread. As always, this forum and the contributors continue to amaze me.

The way I look at it, it is the end result that matters.

If the final resting place for your image is the web, then forget about color profiling accuracy, it will depend on what the viewer's monitor is profiled to show.

If you are doing it for a client, then it is what the client's ultimate resting place is that determines the process and it can then get very tricky very quickly.

If you are doing it for yourself (like me) then it is all about what pleases you.

In the end it is ALL subjective. All discussion is moot, though very interesting.

For me, since my end result is the print, if it matches what I see on the screen and if the screen pleases me, I am quite happy.

The rest of it is all about the cataloging capabilities and LR is quite good at it. So don't need anything else at this point.
 

torger

Active member
Unfortunately I don't have Photoshop at hand (travelling...) and that PSD doesn't open as layers in the Gimp so I can't view it :-/, except for the first layer...

edit: could view it by converting to multipage tiff first using imagemagick. Will post comments soon.
 
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CSP

New member
"I truly find it amazing that C1 uses that color space as a default." Isn't the color space based on the chosen profile in the output recipe?
there is a good reason for a-rgb as default color space in c1 because all c1 camera profiles i have checked fit almost perfect into it. maybe using prophoto makes some sense with acr and lr but with c1 i doubt it has any benefits.
 

torger

Active member
Comments on John's layered PSD with all renders:

- it seems like the profile I made quick in the blind has worked, the look is what I would expect from DCamProf

- DCamProf's contrast is considerably lower. I kind of like that, but if one wants more "pop" the first thing to do is to change the contrast curve to something more similar to C1.

- DCamProf's saturation is lower

- As advertised the difference between Neutral and Neutral+ is very small, you can see that the greens become a bit more yellow and saturation is very slightly increased. Neutral+ is intended as "better neutral than neutral", and I generally suggest that as the main to compare with when comparing to bundled profiles.

- DCamProf contrast is also lower than ACR's results, despite using the same curve, howcome? DCamProf profiles has the blackrender tag that instructs LR to not automatically subtract black. One can remove that tag if one wants automatic black subtraction and get more contrast, but I prefer to have a fixed curve and if you desire higher contrast make a higher contrast curve.

- The DNG PE is the highest saturation profile. I don't know the internals of it, but it seems like it does like most profile makers available to us consumers that it just makes a linear curve reproduction style profile (nocurve variant), and then slaps the RGB curve on top without making any adjustments to compensate the effects of the curve and the psychovisual effects of contrast. This leads to an oversaturated result. As Adobe's curve is RGB-HSV hue stabilized it doesn't lead to much color shifts though.

Then some subjective evalutations: I'm obviously biased but if I was a IQ160 landscape photographer I would certainly look further into DCamProf, possibly making my own contrast curve and match it more with C1, probably have it a bit lower though. That's because I like to have a more neutral starting point, and DCamProf I'm confident that it's the most neutral despite I don't have access to the original scene. To those that think DCamProf's result looks too flat and dull, I'd say the reason is that the lower contrast (and/or that no black subtraction has been made).

I don't think DNG PE is a good alternative for making custom profiles, as it doesn't seem to make adjustments based on the applied curve, the drawbacks is perhaps most seen in high saturation images like this. I prefer Adobe Standard over DNG PE.

C1 seems to have very robust gamut compression, and it may be superior to DCamProf. I'm not sure I like DCamProf's handling of the highlights of the brightest pink/coral leaf/petal, screen profile can come into play here too so it's risky to come to conclusions without further evaluations. On the other hand C1 seems to flatten out the actual brightness differences in the petal which is there (see the nocurve rendering), so I'm not sure what's best. I have noted that both Hasselblad and Phase One apply pretty strong gamut compression which means that saturations are flattened out more and you can't reach as high saturation levels as with other profiles, but it's also very robust and easy to work with.

That's why I'd like to some point to study flowers more, it's a really interesting challenge for profile making.

(Nocurve has no curve and is thus the only one where DeltaE comparisons make sense. If I don't have the real scene at hand I often use a nocurve/linear profile as reference for hues and saturation and then increase the exposure so the midtones is about as bright as the midtones of a profile with contrast. Then by toggling back and forth one letting the eye adjust for a couple of seconds inbetween one gets a sense if the contrast profile has higher or lower saturation and how well the hues match. It matching is good or not is subjective of course, but even so it can be nice when evaluating profiles to have some sort of reference.

Note that when pushing exposure of the nocurve image some areas will likely clip and those cannot be used for evaluation. Many raw converters do nonlinear tricks too when pushing exposure into clipping to simulate film behavior, so I usually use RawTherapee for such comparisons when the exposure slider doesn't do any such tricks.)
 

algrove

Well-known member
"I truly find it amazing that C1 uses that color space as a default." Isn't the color space based on the chosen profile in the output recipe?

I think you can also change it in the "View" section under "proof profiles".. screen grab attached.

View attachment 120050
Thanks for your input.

Since I wrote that post I have changed my process recipe to Prophoto and also found that somehow my images ICC were not correct in that they were set to "flash" with some generic 1998 Adobe color space. Now that I have them set correctly for my camera system and "outdoor daylight", all is well and I can process without issue and now C1's full potential can be used.
 

jng

Well-known member
Thanks Anders for your follow-up analysis. I look forward now to having multiple profiles to compare between C1 and ACR conversions on different types of scenes.

John
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
My workflow FWIW...

I typically convert and output a 16-bit tiff as my "base working file" from C1, then send that to CS for final tweaking based on output. However, my C1 workflow is based on what my intended output is, which is almost always print. Anyway, as such I usually edit in the camera capture space, or occasionally in Prophoto if I think I'm going to push colors around quite a bit in C1, though I rarely do. Next, when I get ready for print is when I toggle between the output profile and working profile in CS (CMD-Y) to make sure colors will look the way I expect them to. With my particular workflow, they usually match extremely closely, but on rare occasion I apply small corrections, and then have several saved "minor" print curves to make slight corrections to saturation and/or contrast as well as black and white points for the specific papers I use.

This discussion will ultimately lead to print rendering intents which definitely can make a difference in the final print. *Usually* for my style of landscape images, Perceptual with BPC works very well. However, when doing certain demanding client work, RC will be superior.
 

ErikKaffehr

Well-known member
Hi Graham,

I went back to the castle and have taken some samples and mesaured with my Color Munki Photo, which is a spectrometer. I took some samples on the petals, the green and brow area of the blades of the pelargonium and the red petals and used the spectral data to create colour patches using Babel Color's "Patchtool" in Prophoto RGB. The set of patches was then pasted into raw conversions from LR6 (actually CC 2015.6) and Capture One.

So I guess this is a close you get on the question of actual colours.

Just to say, the question was a very good one and I am glad to be able to give an answer.
Screen Shot 2016-07-25 at 20.06.49.jpg

Best regards
Erik



The obvious question to Erik is what colour were the blue/purple flowers in real life?

A common problem with digital files and raw rendering is the classic bluebell/purple bell/pink bell flowers. In the UK it was something that would drive me crazy as some cameras and their raw converters produced distinctly different colours for the same shot. Now we know of course that the human eye is sometimes fooled by the fact that what the camera captures and the eye sees/processes can be very different both in absolute terms and in context of other colours and tones.
 

jng

Well-known member
Erik,

Thanks for the update! To clarify: the color patches you show represent the "ground truth" (i.e., what the colors really looked like) regarding the purple, green and red hues, correct?

John
 

ErikKaffehr

Well-known member
Hi John,

Yes, measured data on actual samples, taken from the same flower, but a few days later. Time between cutting of the blades and measurement less than an hour.

Best regards
Erik


Erik,

Thanks for the update! To clarify: the color patches you show represent the "ground truth" (i.e., what the colors really looked like) regarding the purple, green and red hues, correct?

John
 

torger

Active member
Ouch! It shows the P45+ hardware is capable to match the hue, but the C1 profile mess it up. Way too large hue error to my taste. Modulating lightness and to some extent saturation for subjective reasons is fine, but hue changes I think one should be really careful with as a profile designer.

It would be interesting to know why Phase One chose that, because the error is so large it must be deliberate. I guess they have fixed it with later backs?
 

jng

Well-known member
Ouch indeed! Although I sometimes struggle a bit with hue shifts in the yellows, such large shifts in the purple/blue range don't seem to be an issue with the newer IQ160 using either ACR or C1, at least in my hands.

When I first saw Erik's examples I was reminded of my own past struggles with the way that purples rendered inaccurately in my old D700 files!

John
 

ErikKaffehr

Well-known member
Hi Anders,

The reason I started this discussion was that it is mostly suggested that MFD must be used with vendors software and Adobe products give inferior results. I am not particularly fond of being forced to use a specific vendor's product.

So, I wanted to discuss/find out how much of the purported advantages of C1 for Phase One files was related to profiles and how much was inherent in the raw processor.

What I think this thread demonstrates clearly is colour profiles play a very significant role in colour rendition and they don't just affect hues but also tone curves.

I would say that C1 has some advantages in suppressing aliasing compared to ACR/LR6 and I seriously think Adobe has a lot of homework in that area, but those aspects were not visible on the subjects here. Just for completeness, here are some links to discussions on that issue:

http://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?topic=94812.0
http://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?topic=104708.0

Another point I would make is that this demonstrates one of the great advantages of parametric workflow. I use mostly profiles created with DCamProf for my new images, but once I have worked trough the profiles I can apply them to older images, too. When I did my profiling shots I include most of the cameras I have used since 2008. Just minimal work. Once the images in TIFF, profiles cannot easily be applied.

Best regards
Erik

Ouch! It shows the P45+ hardware is capable to match the hue, but the C1 profile mess it up. Way too large hue error to my taste. Modulating lightness and to some extent saturation for subjective reasons is fine, but hue changes I think one should be really careful with as a profile designer.

It would be interesting to know why Phase One chose that, because the error is so large it must be deliberate. I guess they have fixed it with later backs?
 

torger

Active member
Just a few comments on using a spectrometer for getting a reference color to compare to; ideally you should also measure the illuminant that was used in the photo, but if you shoot under sunny daylight approximating it as D50 is okay, and cloudy D65. Golden hour light or sky light after sunset can have more extreme temperatures making it more important to also record the spectrum. And if it's low light our eyes gradually goes into night vision which also affects our color vision.

The flower shots seems to be shut under daylight sun, approx D50, so very good light to test hues.

A good profile which has a film curve must modulate the colors a bit to compenaste for the psychovisual effects of contrast. However it's really only saturation (and lightness which the curve itself affects), the hue should not change except for special cases near/past gamut clipping. That is when you compare with a measured patch you should expect that saturation can be different, but hue should not be much different.

Many camera profiles do adjust hue to some extent, warming up colors is common for example, but those changes does not need to be very large. Broadly speaking even after subjective hue changes the colors have the same names, eg purple is still purple although possibly a slightly different shade. However in this case when the color even has changed name, purple has become blue, then I think one has the right to complain on the profile :), it should not be that large differences.

As I've said before it's more difficult to get highly saturated colors right from a technical aspect, but still purple should not become blue, that must be some odd design choice by Phase One in this case. I really wonder what they have been thinking. In many genres you rarely come across colors as saturated as this though, so I guess that's why Phase One has gotten away with it. But say if I was a product photographer and shot saturated plastics or indeed flowers, hue errors at this level would not be acceptable. I simply see no reason why a camera profile should change hues so much that it gets a different name, eg purple becomes blue.
 
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