Capture One or LR6?

[ErikKaffehr]

Hi,

Conventional wisdom say that P45+ must be used Capture One. Personally I have a very strong preference for LR6. The one thing I do is that I use my own camera profiles for Lightroom, I have done that from day zero I had the P45+.

A few months ago I started using DCamProf, a tool developed by Anders Torger, with Lightroom.

Here are some screendumps from images processed in Capture One and Lightroom. Both pretty much basically processed.

• Color profiles: Daylight in C1 and DcamProf in LR6
• Highlight compression: HDR highlight slider in C1 and "higlights" in LR6
• Shadows: HDR shadows slider in C1 and shadows slider in LR6
• Colour profiles: Daylight in C1 DCamProf in LR6
• WB, white balance on same spot on both
• Sharpening: C1 defaults and my own default for P45+ in LR6

Results (C1 left LR right):




The "raw" file: http://echophoto.dnsalias.net/ekr/Articles/Shoots/DivSamples/RAWS/CF045436.IIQ
The DCP profile used is here (hopefully the right one): http://echophoto.dnsalias.net/ekr/Articles/Shoots/DivSamples/ColourProfiles/P45+_dual.dcp

Screenshots:
http://echophoto.dnsalias.net/ekr/Articles/Shoots/DivSamples/Screendumps/Screend1.png
http://echophoto.dnsalias.net/ekr/Articles/Shoots/DivSamples/Screendumps/Screend2.png

So, what do I see? In these cases I actually prefer the results from Lightroom. That has obviously a lot to do with bias, I am a long time Lightroom user.

Anders Torger has done a great job with DCamProf, that effort should be applauded. DCamProf can generate profiles for Capture One, even if C1 is more tricky.

I have found that C1 does often a somewhat better job on colour aliasing than Lightroom. But, aliasing is not a great problem in many images, as resolution is often limited by workflow.

The results here reflect my experience with Lightroom (plenty) and with C1 (little), but both are very basic conversions.

Best regards
Erik

 

[ErikKaffehr]

Re: Capture One or LR6? Another example.

Hi,

Here is another example, a P45+ shot this spring.

The images below have two crops. Processing is (left to right) C1 - linear profile, LR6 (dcamprof), C1 - film profile.

Raw image is here: Access forbidden!

Screendumps (full size):
http://echophoto.dnsalias.net/ekr/Articles/Shoots/DivSamples/LR_VS_C1/Screen3.png
http://echophoto.dnsalias.net/ekr/Articles/Shoots/DivSamples/LR_VS_C1/Screen4.png




My take is that both can produce a nice image. LR with DCamProf has lower contrast and higher saturation. A lot of grass colours are outside Adobe RGB, which is about what we can have visible on screen, but they would be printable on my Epson 3880. So I need to make some prints, but those are hard to share. over the net

The idea with these comparison is not to find out which is the best raw converter to P45+, but mainly to see if LR is OK using DCamProf generated profiles. Both converters have a wide range of options to improve an image and may take a long time to master. So what I trying to do here is to use colour profiles with as little manual adjustments as it is feasible.

Best regards
Erik

 

[torger]

I'm a bit surprised over the large difference in saturation. Not in the flowers though, as both Hasselblad and Phase One desaturates high saturation colors *a lot*, and it's actually a good strategy as raw converters by tradition aren't that good at compressing gamuts in nice ways. I will probably revisit that area at some time with DCamProf as I'm not sure the gamut compression stuff is handling these cases as good as it could.

When I started working with gamut compression I thought it would be easy, but it isn't. The problem is that you can't really just mathematically compress into the smaller gamut (which is easy) as that will make bright high saturation colors that clip look dull, sunsets a good example. So you need to compress, but still let it clip and finding that balance was not so easy. You even have to sacrifice some hue accuracy, letting clipping reds become a bit orange for example.

What surprises me is the large difference in the normal range of colors like seen in the buildings. I guess that Phase One's profile is a bit under-saturated, but possibly DCamProf's result is a little over-saturated. I need a fresh memory of the scene to decide. In any case it's easy to adjust by changing the "ChromaScaling" value.

If your workflow always include a lot of post-processing work of colors it's usually wise to have a somewhat desaturated profile, so possibly the C1 profile is intentionally slightly low on saturation.

The intention of a DCamProf default profile is to render colors as realistically as possible, and keep that realism with the film curve. The problem with profile makers from say X-Rite is that they only make the profile to work with a linear curve (reproduction mode) and then slap the film curve on top with no other modifications, and thus ignores how the curve affects colors, both in terms of hue distortion but also in terms of the psychovisual non-linear connection between contrast and saturation. Bundled profiles in C1 (and also Adobe) makes similar adjustments as DCamProf but their profile making tools are inhouse and not available to users.

Anyway, the most obvious difference is that Phase One's profiles applies a warm tone, or like I prefer to call it - a yellow cast as it's not there in reality. AFAIK the yellow cast look is unique to Phase One. I suppose it's fixable using the C1 color editor though.

Personally I don't see any reason for the heavy bashing LR receives if you make custom profiles. The default profiles provided by Adobe is indeed often not that good, although there are large differences depending on camera model. Sure the noise reduction and demosaicing is not as finely tuned as for C1 but I consider that difference to be marginal. I wouldn't exaggerate the "badness" of Adobe's profiles either. If you work with landscape for example with lots of post-processing applied I don't see that Adobe's default profiles would be a big issue. If you work with skin tones and product photography etc I do see that Adobe's profiles can be a problem.

I work with landscape and is in actuality not that sensitive to color profile, but I just want to maximize the potential of my digital gear. Digital can make much more natural and realistic colors than film ever could, and then I just want that. I do apply post-processing to my colors, but I just find it to make much more sense to have a starting point that is as realistic as possible (within reason, I don't think it makes sense to simulate human night vision for example).

The raw converter choice to me is more about which one you like the most in terms of adjustment tools and workflow. And sure, there are strong reasons to prefer C1 also in that case, but I guess it depends on what you're used to. That a Phase One digital back would be fantastically better in C1 than in any other raw converter I consider to be a profile thing.

And in terms of profile, despite that it's certainly well-designed and robust, I'd either adjust the default in C1, or make a custom profile (it's possible to make DCamProf profiles for C1 too), as to me the yellow cast does not make any sense. What a profile could do is to adjust lightness to make tonality show better, adjust saturation to match psychovisual effects related to contrast, compress gamut, do some tricks around clipping, and possibly slightly adjust hues to improve color separation (or reduce it, common in caucasian skintone range).

Applying pretty much a global color cast is not one of those things I think a profile should do though, and it's a mystery to me why it's there and why so few seems to have noted it. My guess is that it's some sort of legacy thing that once users got used to they couldn't remove it, or the "Image Professor" has some strange taste, or perhaps many actually like it and Phase One sells more cameras due to this look. I don't know.

 

[tjv]

I've been struggling with C1 since getting my Leaf back. I think it's a great bit of software, but coming from Lightroom, not to mention a workflow based 100% on scanning film with an Imacon – I'd output 16bit TIFFs from Flexcolor and edit in PS/LR – it has been a tricky transition that is still proving itself to be an ongoing headache.

The hardest part for me is understanding the colour profiles and how C1 in general handles colour. I bought a Rocky Nook book to try get a better grasp how exactly each component of the software works, but much of it was glossed over quickly. I'm not at all hung up on getting accurate colour, more something that matches my subjective vision honed during years of shooting, scanning and printing from film. Portra was never what I'd call accurate, so perhaps that's where my frustrations lie?

Essentially, I find that the Leaf profiles seem really lifeless and with generally low saturation and kind of odd colour balance, especially for landscape work. For example, skies seem to look too light and generally grey, and subtle shifts of color temp and light during a shooting session are masked unless I choose the ProPhoto profile. In an nutshell, the Leaf profiles just seem to suck the magic out of things. They don't seem either particularly accurate or pleasing (at least to my subjective eye,) so I've resorted to using the ProPhoto profile as my default import profile, almost never opting for anything else. The ProPhoto profile is very saturated however, so I dial that down in combination with some selective editing in the advanced colour editor tab, but the overall colour balance seems better to me off the bat, or at least closer to what I'm aiming for overall for the final print. As I do it now, I get as close as I can in C1 then output to 16bit TIFFs and fine tune in LR like I always used to with my film scans. Probably not what advanced C1 users ever resort to doing...

I trust my eyes – at least when working on my Eizo monitor – but I wonder if I'm missing something. Are the Leaf profiles just very low key, generally low saturation profiles? Are they a bit boring, or what? Why am I not seeing the Leaf colour magic that people rave about with my back specific profiles, and why might ProPhoto be getting me better results? To be clear, I don't want to emulate film or portra colour specifically, it's just happens that I had a workflow down pat and it has gone out of the window now... In short, for the love of God, please help me!!!!

Too many questions from a person that understands colour management in terms of keeping things consistent from screen to print, but nothing about camera profiles.

 

[ChrisLivsey]

I had not really seen the yellow cast in C1, although I have not done much comparitive work with other programs so may just be used to it and dial it out mentally. That is until I played with a recent lens aquisition a 50mm C Zeiss NOT T* coated. On the P45+ I now notice a pronounced yellow in particular on the greens, is this related to the coating or IR contamination again from the coating? The coating that is on is very clean and I did buy the lens for a lower conrast B/W look on film but of course digital testing is more rapid

 

[ErikKaffehr]

Hi!

Input profile should be one of the profiles for your back. An input profile describes your back.

It would be helpful if you posted a raw image showing the issues you have. We are eager to help but need to observe the problem.

Best regards
Erik

I've been struggling with C1 since getting my Leaf back. I think it's a great bit of software, but coming from Lightroom, not to mention a workflow based 100% on scanning film with an Imacon – I'd output 16bit TIFFs from Flexcolor and edit in PS/LR – it has been a tricky transition that is still proving itself to be an ongoing headache.

The hardest part for me is understanding the colour profiles and how C1 in general handles colour. I bought a Rocky Nook book to try get a better grasp how exactly each component of the software works, but much of it was glossed over quickly. I'm not at all hung up on getting accurate colour, more something that matches my subjective vision honed during years of shooting, scanning and printing from film. Portra was never what I'd call accurate, so perhaps that's where my frustrations lie?

Essentially, I find that the Leaf profiles seem really lifeless and with generally low saturation and kind of odd colour balance, especially for landscape work. For example, skies seem to look too light and generally grey, and subtle shifts of color temp and light during a shooting session are masked unless I choose the ProPhoto profile. In an nutshell, the Leaf profiles just seem to suck the magic out of things. They don't seem either particularly accurate or pleasing (at least to my subjective eye,) so I've resorted to using the ProPhoto profile as my default import profile, almost never opting for anything else. The ProPhoto profile is very saturated however, so I dial that down in combination with some selective editing in the advanced colour editor tab, but the overall colour balance seems better to me off the bat, or at least closer to what I'm aiming for overall for the final print. As I do it now, I get as close as I can in C1 then output to 16bit TIFFs and fine tune in LR like I always used to with my film scans. Probably not what advanced C1 users ever resort to doing...

I trust my eyes – at least when working on my Eizo monitor – but I wonder if I'm missing something. Are the Leaf profiles just very low key, generally low saturation profiles? Are they a bit boring, or what? Why am I not seeing the Leaf colour magic that people rave about with my back specific profiles, and why might ProPhoto be getting me better results? To be clear, I don't want to emulate film or portra colour specifically, it's just happens that I had a workflow down pat and it has gone out of the window now... In short, for the love of God, please help me!!!!

Too many questions from a person that understands colour management in terms of keeping things consistent from screen to print, but nothing about camera profiles.

 

[torger]

I've been struggling with C1 since getting my Leaf back. I think it's a great bit of software, but coming from Lightroom, not to mention a workflow based 100% on scanning film with an Imacon – I'd output 16bit TIFFs from Flexcolor and edit in PS/LR – it has been a tricky transition that is still proving itself to be an ongoing headache.

The hardest part for me is understanding the colour profiles and how C1 in general handles colour. I bought a Rocky Nook book to try get a better grasp how exactly each component of the software works, but much of it was glossed over quickly. I'm not at all hung up on getting accurate colour, more something that matches my subjective vision honed during years of shooting, scanning and printing from film. Portra was never what I'd call accurate, so perhaps that's where my frustrations lie?

Essentially, I find that the Leaf profiles seem really lifeless and with generally low saturation and kind of odd colour balance, especially for landscape work. For example, skies seem to look too light and generally grey, and subtle shifts of color temp and light during a shooting session are masked unless I choose the ProPhoto profile. In an nutshell, the Leaf profiles just seem to suck the magic out of things. They don't seem either particularly accurate or pleasing (at least to my subjective eye,) so I've resorted to using the ProPhoto profile as my default import profile, almost never opting for anything else. The ProPhoto profile is very saturated however, so I dial that down in combination with some selective editing in the advanced colour editor tab, but the overall colour balance seems better to me off the bat, or at least closer to what I'm aiming for overall for the final print. As I do it now, I get as close as I can in C1 then output to 16bit TIFFs and fine tune in LR like I always used to with my film scans. Probably not what advanced C1 users ever resort to doing...

I trust my eyes – at least when working on my Eizo monitor – but I wonder if I'm missing something. Are the Leaf profiles just very low key, generally low saturation profiles? Are they a bit boring, or what? Why am I not seeing the Leaf colour magic that people rave about with my back specific profiles, and why might ProPhoto be getting me better results? To be clear, I don't want to emulate film or portra colour specifically, it's just happens that I had a workflow down pat and it has gone out of the window now... In short, for the love of God, please help me!!!!

Too many questions from a person that understands colour management in terms of keeping things consistent from screen to print, but nothing about camera profiles.

My guess is that you're not doing anything wrong, but you simply don't like Leaf's profiles. Also Leaf's profiles are highly subjective and you may or you may not like them. I sort of liked them but I didn't use them much as I've used custom profiles for a long time. I know some (all?) Leaf profiles desaturates colors close to neutral to make "neutrals more neutral" which you may or may not like (sounds to me that you would not like it), but otherwise the look should be quite saturated if I remember correctly, so the only strange thing in your story is that you say you experience the profiles as desaturated in a global sense, but it's hard to see exactly what you mean without an example image of course.

If I remember Yair's info correctly the oddly named "ProPhoto" profile (it really hasn't anything to do with prophoto) was made by Leaf as some users wanted a more neutral profile as a starting point for their own looks. I don't know how it relates to a contrast curve though. If it was designed like a reproduction profile it could look over-saturated when used with a curve.

"Accurate" color can really only exist in a reproduction use case with fixed light close to D50, linear curve, and printing a copy of the artwork or whatever you shot and view it under controlled light. Therefore I prefer to use the term "realistic" color when it comes to general-purpose photography. For some type of scenes I prefer realistic color the best (say midday sun conditions) but in most cases I modulate colors a little for atmosphere/mood and matching images in a series. Still I prefer to have a reference point to start with, and when I can have realistic color, I choose realistic colors.

The problem with strongly subjective profiles from manufacturers, even if you like them, is that if you change gear some point you suddenly get vastly different color response and suddenly it becomes hard to get the colors you want. The "Prophoto" profile for Leaf backs is the closest to neutral/realistic you'll get without using a custom profile, so I guess it's a good starting point.

Perhaps you should shoot a typical scene with both your old film workflow and your new digital workflow, and then try to if not match at least get a look which is to your eyes as pleasing as the film look. Maybe by experimenting with that you could figure out what type of adjustments you need to do to get where you want. Having something to compare to makes things much easier.

 

[algrove]

I've been struggling with C1 since getting my Leaf back. I think it's a great bit of software, but coming from Lightroom, not to mention a workflow based 100% on scanning film with an Imacon – I'd output 16bit TIFFs from Flexcolor and edit in PS/LR – it has been a tricky transition that is still proving itself to be an ongoing headache.

The hardest part for me is understanding the colour profiles and how C1 in general handles colour. I bought a Rocky Nook book to try get a better grasp how exactly each component of the software works, but much of it was glossed over quickly. I'm not at all hung up on getting accurate colour, more something that matches my subjective vision honed during years of shooting, scanning and printing from film. Portra was never what I'd call accurate, so perhaps that's where my frustrations lie?

Essentially, I find that the Leaf profiles seem really lifeless and with generally low saturation and kind of odd colour balance, especially for landscape work. For example, skies seem to look too light and generally grey, and subtle shifts of color temp and light during a shooting session are masked unless I choose the ProPhoto profile. In an nutshell, the Leaf profiles just seem to suck the magic out of things. They don't seem either particularly accurate or pleasing (at least to my subjective eye,) so I've resorted to using the ProPhoto profile as my default import profile, almost never opting for anything else. The ProPhoto profile is very saturated however, so I dial that down in combination with some selective editing in the advanced colour editor tab, but the overall colour balance seems better to me off the bat, or at least closer to what I'm aiming for overall for the final print. As I do it now, I get as close as I can in C1 then output to 16bit TIFFs and fine tune in LR like I always used to with my film scans. Probably not what advanced C1 users ever resort to doing...

I trust my eyes – at least when working on my Eizo monitor – but I wonder if I'm missing something. Are the Leaf profiles just very low key, generally low saturation profiles? Are they a bit boring, or what? Why am I not seeing the Leaf colour magic that people rave about with my back specific profiles, and why might ProPhoto be getting me better results? To be clear, I don't want to emulate film or portra colour specifically, it's just happens that I had a workflow down pat and it has gone out of the window now... In short, for the love of God, please help me!!!!

Too many questions from a person that understands colour management in terms of keeping things consistent from screen to print, but nothing about camera profiles.

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.

 

[torger]

It may be some confusion going on here, not sure. There's a Leaf camera profile that's called "Prophoto" which has nothing to do with the Prophoto color space. I thought it was that tjv referred to, but now I'm not as sure...

 

[msadat]

beside the output, workflow is also important. the current version of the LR CC is extremely slow and buggy and i am planning to give c1 a try. so have that in mind

 

[Bill Caulfeild-Browne]

This is a most interesting thread. I use Prophoto as my colour space and I generally find C1 is pretty good (I'm a print maker) except for saturation. Although I abhor the over-saturated images that seem to be fashionable these days, I do find that C1 under-saturates. I generally have to add at least 10-15 points to get the colour I think I remember! (This is with the IQ3-100, but true of the IQ180 too).

Do others find the same issue?

Bill

 

[Paul2660]

I tend to stay away from ProPhoto color space as it's too easy to get colors out of gamut, at least for an Epson 9900 or 7800, especially blues. I realize this is a very individual preference.

C1 on the CCD backs for me always seemed a tad oversaturated but on the IQ100, I find it way over saturated on green. In fact images when first loaded in C1 have a rather green tint to them. Easy fix, but an interesting issue. Other colors seem fine. LR still has no support for the 100 at least last time I checked.

As for C1 vs LR, if and when LR supports the IQ100 I will often start in C1 and if I can't get where I want to go, will try LR. The tool sets in each C1 and LR have certain strengths that I like, examples:

Auto mask in LR, Color picker in C1, adjustment layers in C1 vs LR's adjustment brush, (still all or nothing). C1 offers sessions which I prefer, LR has an excellent print engine.

Paul C

 

[torger]

This is a most interesting thread. I use Prophoto as my colour space and I generally find C1 is pretty good (I'm a print maker) except for saturation. Although I abhor the over-saturated images that seem to be fashionable these days, I do find that C1 under-saturates. I generally have to add at least 10-15 points to get the colour I think I remember! (This is with the IQ3-100, but true of the IQ180 too).

Do others find the same issue?

Bill

The P45+ photo in the first post here does look under-saturated. I've noted that under-saturated profiles are quite popular for higher end cameras also in Lightroom. I don't really know for sure why, but my theory is that if you're doing post-processing on colors anyway it's an advantage to start off a bit lower on saturation, as it's easier to work with increasing saturation (perhaps selectively) than decreasing.

There are also advantages from a profile design perspective to make an under-saturated profile. Increasing saturation means separating the color channels more, which means increasing noise. A desaturated profile will thus make the camera look less noisy.

It's also more difficult to make a robust profile with realistically saturated colors than an undersaturated profile, because if you make normal colors saturated enough you'll end up pushing high saturation colors (like flowers etc) outside the gamut and you need to apply quite heavy gamut compression. To make nice gradients you need that gamut compression to work over a wide range, and letting it go into the normal colors (so those become under-saturated) makes it easier to make the profile look good.

So my guess is that all the profiles are intentionally slightly desaturated for these reasons.

(With DCamProf the default is to make also the normal colors look realistically saturated, but it has caused me significant pain in getting the profile robust for the high saturation colors, and I'd say that even now it's not as robust as a typical C1 profile.)

 

[tjv]

Anders, I think you're right. It's probably that I just don't really like the Leaf profiles.

You're also right in that it's not exactly a global saturation issue. I went back today to have a quick look – admittedly on my laptop not Eizo – and found that it is in fact more to do with colours that are closer to neutral tones. The reason this annoys me so much is that if I photograph during the "blue hour", for example, the lovely light is just sucked right out of the picture and everything seems forced closer to neutral, paricularly in skies and within the built environment. This is where selecting the ProPhoto camera profile helps. I pretty much always choose this in conjunction with the Product curve. I will admit though that I do have to knock back the saturation to tone the colour down a bit, but it's still much better to my eye than the Leaf Product profiles for example. On the occasions that I want a more neutral colour it's good to know now how the Leaf profiles might be operating.

It's interesting to hear that Bill is mostly selecting the ProPhoto profile with his back also. Bill, do you still find you add saturation to your conversions when using ProPhoto to get them where you want? I'm guessing Leaf and Phase do have some hardware differences, else the two makes of backs could simply be considered interchangeable with the same profile set – which I understand isn't the case.

What I also want to know is if I edit an image with the ProPhoto camera profile selected (getting it pretty close to where I want it,) then I export to a 16bit TIFF in the ProPhoto colour space; if colours are out of printer gamut can I still pull them back in LR (which I use to finetune and print from,) without too much worry that I'm losing too much data? I'm generally talking relatively minor adjustments here, on things like fluroesent orange road signs and cones that don't show clipping warnings but look a little hot and flat on close inspection.

Also, what do people tend to select as their rendering intent? When I first opened C1 I selected Relative Colormetric in the preferences as that's what I've always used with best results in other programmes – minimising colour shifts etc during exports – but now, considering my rather convoluted workflow, I'm not so sure as I could run the risk of clipping data? Or does selecting the ProPhoto output profile effectively negate this issue?

TJV

PS: Sorry, I'd post RAW files for others to look at but I'm unable to share them due to commercial sensitivities.

My guess is that you're not doing anything wrong, but you simply don't like Leaf's profiles. Also Leaf's profiles are highly subjective and you may or you may not like them. I sort of liked them but I didn't use them much as I've used custom profiles for a long time. I know some (all?) Leaf profiles desaturates colors close to neutral to make "neutrals more neutral" which you may or may not like (sounds to me that you would not like it), but otherwise the look should be quite saturated if I remember correctly, so the only strange thing in your story is that you say you experience the profiles as desaturated in a global sense, but it's hard to see exactly what you mean without an example image of course.

If I remember Yair's info correctly the oddly named "ProPhoto" profile (it really hasn't anything to do with prophoto) was made by Leaf as some users wanted a more neutral profile as a starting point for their own looks. I don't know how it relates to a contrast curve though. If it was designed like a reproduction profile it could look over-saturated when used with a curve.

"Accurate" color can really only exist in a reproduction use case with fixed light close to D50, linear curve, and printing a copy of the artwork or whatever you shot and view it under controlled light. Therefore I prefer to use the term "realistic" color when it comes to general-purpose photography. For some type of scenes I prefer realistic color the best (say midday sun conditions) but in most cases I modulate colors a little for atmosphere/mood and matching images in a series. Still I prefer to have a reference point to start with, and when I can have realistic color, I choose realistic colors.

The problem with strongly subjective profiles from manufacturers, even if you like them, is that if you change gear some point you suddenly get vastly different color response and suddenly it becomes hard to get the colors you want. The "Prophoto" profile for Leaf backs is the closest to neutral/realistic you'll get without using a custom profile, so I guess it's a good starting point.

Perhaps you should shoot a typical scene with both your old film workflow and your new digital workflow, and then try to if not match at least get a look which is to your eyes as pleasing as the film look. Maybe by experimenting with that you could figure out what type of adjustments you need to do to get where you want. Having something to compare to makes things much easier.

 

[torger]

I think Bill was only talking about Prophoto color space, not Leaf's confusingly named "Prophoto" camera profile.

Leaf has its own camera profile pipeline so Leaf profiles are not working on Phase One backs or the other way around. That is even if hardware is exactly the same the software doesn't allow interchanging camera profiles between those brands.

Leaf had their own raw converter and thus their own color pipeline and own way of formatting their ICC profiles, which is different from Phase One's. I know this as I reverse-engineered the format for the RawTherapee project. When Leaf was bought by Phase One and their backs started to be supported by Capture One they did not change the profile format, but instead added the color pipeline from Leaf into Capture One. This pipeline is only used for Leaf backs though. Phase One and third party cameras like Canon, Nikon, Sony etc all use the same original Capture One color pipeline and thus you can interchange profiles between them if you have two cameras with similar hardware color response, but Leaf profiles on any other camera will look like crazy.

Leaf backs, at least the Aptus series, embeds a plain color matrix for direct conversion to the Prophoto color space. It's on that the ICC profile is then applied (in Capture One there's no pre-matrixing like that). If I remember correctly the Leaf-Prophoto camera profile is almost indistinguishable from that plain color matrix result, I guess that's why it's called "Prophoto", because you get (almost) the same result as the embedded white-balanced-raw-color-to-prophoto-color-space conversion matrix. This means that that profile is not adapted for being used with a curve, so when you apply a product curve you will get some over-saturation and some hue shifts, just as if you apply a plain RGB S-curve on any image. It can still be okay as a post-processing starting point, but as far as I understand it's a very basic profile, just as if you would make a profile using say X-Rite's software with a CC24.

 

[torger]

What I also want to know is if I edit an image with the ProPhoto camera profile selected (getting it pretty close to where I want it,) then I export to a 16bit TIFF in the ProPhoto colour space; if colours are out of printer gamut can I still pull them back in LR (which I use to finetune and print from,) without too much worry that I'm losing too much data? I'm generally talking relatively minor adjustments here, on things like fluroesent orange road signs and cones that don't show clipping warnings but look a little hot and flat on close inspection.

Also, what do people tend to select as their rendering intent? When I first opened C1 I selected Relative Colormetric in the preferences as that's what I've always used with best results in other programmes – minimising colour shifts etc during exports – but now, considering my rather convoluted workflow, I'm not so sure as I could run the risk of clipping data? Or does selecting the ProPhoto output profile effectively negate this issue?

Note that many not used to Leaf cameras will be confused by the term "ProPhoto camera profile" as to all other users "Prophoto" is a color space and nothing else. But as Leaf users we know that this is just one of their camera profiles . To answer the question, yes you can still pull them back in LR. I'm no expert in LR, but I know there are hue adjustment sliders there and you can pull individual colors back. Or you just let the relative colorimetric printing mode rolloff handle it, if it's not too much out of gamut the result is usually fine.

I use relative colorimetric for printing, with black point compensation (BPC is always on in most software these days, AFAIK it's always on in LR and there's no option to disable it). Strict relative colorimetric should hard-clip any out-of-gamut colors (also towards the blackpoint), but I think no commercial package is strict these days but does some sort of rolloff so it doesn't look ugly. Perceptual rendering means that you use the printer profile's hard-coded gamut compression which is pre-made with an assumption of what your source gamut is, which probably is AdobeRGB and not ProPhoto that you're using. Unfortunately there's no tag in the printer profile that says which source gamut it was made for, but I think AdobeRGB source is the most common. As it's hard-coded and static it always compress even if the image doesn't contain colors outside the gamut. Static compression like this was certainly good when ICC format was new back in the 1990s when computers weren't that powerful, but today I don't think it makes sense. When I make my own printer profiles I don't even care to include a perceptual rendering table.

The "defacto standard" with dynamic soft rolloff on relative colorimetric is makes much more sense. If you get too much clipping still, you can always use the color adjustment tools in your raw converter or photoshop to reduce the gamut for problem colors prior to printing.

 

[Bill Caulfeild-Browne]

I was indeed writing about Prophoto colour space (as an alternative to Adobe 1998). But my comments re undersaturation would apply to Adobe 1998 as well.

I like Torger's explanation for undersaturation. That makes sense to me - though I'm certainly no expert in this field!

 

[DougDolde]

I don't see it talked about here very often but Joseph Holmes' Ekta Space PS profile is the one to use. Not so much for the profile itself but for the Chroma variants you can assign once the image is converted to the Ekta Space PS profile. They are similar to saturation adjustments but are non destructive and can be changed at will

The only instance I use the Saturation slider is generally when I need to reduce the saturation of a specific color.

http://www.josephholmes.com/profiles.html

 

[Pradeep]

I stopped using C1 when I found out it did not support Pentax MF files and that the round-tripping from PS or other filters (Silver Efex Pro etc) was not as robust as with LR.

I only print via QImage and as discussed here before, it does a much better job (IMHO) than either LR or PS.

I am not particularly fussy about color accuracy as long as I see what I like on the screen and the print matches it. I think color is a highly subjective aspect of an image. How does one know what the scene looked like, unless you put in a Macbeth color chart in every shot? Skin tones too are so variable, but arguably easier to 'correct' since we intuitively know what they should look like. Landscapes, buildings, objects, flowers, who is to say what the correct RGB value should be or the saturation?

Overall, I am quite happy with LR at present, it could certainly improve in certain areas, but it checks most of the boxes for me.

 

[algrove]

I stopped using C1 when I found out it did not support Pentax MF files and that the round-tripping from PS or other filters (Silver Efex Pro etc) was not as robust as with LR.

With the round-tripping part, you lost me. What exactly do you mean? TIA