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.)