I’ve been trying to find the best method to demosiac 1920x1080 cinemaDNG raw video from a blackmagic camera, the micro cinema camera to be specific. Artifacts need extra consideration due to the low resolution which cannot be downsampled, and interpretation needs to be consistent frame to frame to avoid shimmering, moire and other issues that are more perceptible in motion.
Looking at the RCD demosiac, the spatial interpretation seems to be low resolution but very accurate, never showing zippering or aliasing. But it has a lot of chroma artifacting.
Whereas, LMMSE has excellent resolution and virtually no color artifacting especially at the level 6 enhancement. But it has tremendous zippering issues.
So what I’ve been doing is exporting two TIFFs in 16bit linear, and using a blend mode to take the color (hue and saturation) from the LMMSE demosaic and blend it with the luma from the RCD demosiac.
The result has less resolution than LMMSE but I’ve yet to find any place where it has noticeable artifacting and it also seems to reduce the amplitude and chromaticity of noise substantially compared to either of the demosaic methods alone. It’s lack of artifacts make it pretty amenable to sharpening as well, though LMMSE still pulls out more detail.
I’d love for there to be a way to do both these steps together in one software rather than rendering two steps, or another method similar to this which can blend the strengths of demosaicing differently for luma and chroma. Right now this workflow is too tedious.
RDC is supposed to be good at maximizing resolution while LMMSE is suitable for noisy images. Have you tried RDC with false color suppression and Capture Sharpening?
maybe you can share the example raw file here? i have not seen such colour artifacts with RCD, only if the wb coefs have not been applied before demosaicing. it works on colour differences (instead of ratios) which is susceptible to at least approximate white balancing.
Thank you for the suggestions, I did find that false color suppression reduces moire artifacts but does also cause a chroma ‘glow’ and a loss of color detail. Here’s the raw file.
I think this looks close to your desired results. All I did was set false color suppression steps to 1 and enabled automatic raw chromatic aberration correction on top of the neutral profile. The final settings are
Thanks. The auto correction isn’t consistent frame to frame or even within the frame, it seems to break the frame into sections and correct each section differently so it’s not going to work for video. But by dialing in numbers which work for my lens it does show a huge improvement without needing as much color suppression. I think this will work!
