I can get similar results, but I can’t fathom why I can’t get the same smoothness from the original JPEG. There seems to be some artifacts in the RAW that I cannot explain. It seems it has something to do with the input profile again: there are burnt pixels that show up differently depending on the profile, which don’t seem to show up in the original JPEG… Here’s a 200% zoom on the bridge in the OOC JPEG:
Here’s the same crop with the standard input profile, with the rough deep blues:
Notice how the blues are burnt off chart, but also how the truss edges of the bridge are pixelized… The linear Rec709 RGB profile restore the scene, but burnt pixels actually remain on the truss edges, if you look closely:
Now, I’ve kept messing around with input profiles and I notice this phenomenon doesn’t occur with all input profiles. The linear XYZ profile, for example, doesn’t seem to have burnt pixels on the edges the same way the other two have:
Now obviously the colors are off to the red and the green and look weird. But notice how we don’t get those burnt pixels anymore? I guess this is what @garrett was referring to regarding colors out of gamut?
I think this is one of the problems I can’t grasp here: is it common to have to mess around with the input profile in order to remove burnt pixels? In this case, I can see with the gamut check tool (thanks for that!) that the rec709 profile gives the best results, but it still breaks down on the bridge trusses, just less so than all the other profiles:
The Linear XYZ profile, even though it looks faithful there, is just completely off the chart for the whole bridge in terms of gamut, so I guess that’s a lost cause for rendering…?
Here is, for reference, the gamut check with the standard color matrix:
A bit better than the XYZ profile, but still way off…
I see that the Fujifilm cameras don’t have a custom matrix in the camera support page, could this explain the problems with input profiles here? Is this the same as the DCP profiles RawTherapee uses? They don’t have one for the X-T2, but they do have one for the X-Pro2, which has a similar sensor… Could this be imported into DT?
Otherwise, I’d be happy to help creating such a profile if it could help…
Thanks again for all the great answers!