For a while now, I have been struggling with recreating the colors and tones of my Fuji camera in Darktable. So how about we turn this into a challenge: The explicit goal of this PlayRaw is to match the JPG colors straight out of my cameras.
Edit: Ideally, you should achieve a similar rendition without local adjustments.
To this end, the following JPGs are unedited, but shot with different camera settings:
I missed the goal to match the JPG colors intentionally because I did not like that colors. They looked somewhat muddy and had a strong red/purp tint which seemed to be too intense for a sundown scene. Especially the bright clouds looked unnatural for my taste.
My result for the first photo:
The sky is more blue and the purp haze above the horizon and in the lower clouds give the feeling of a sundown.
I decreased the saturation in the clouds and increased contrast in the thin clouds that are slightly visible in the background.
As you can see in a 100% crop there is much more contrast/detail and less noise in the clouds. And the red haze is gone.
In the lower part the blue in water and sky looks more natural and you see the difference in noise reduction. Afterwards I think I could have shapened it a bit more.
With the linear RGB as a start, I applied a filmic curve and scooched it around to match the tone, but found the colors still slightly desaturated based on the camera JPEG, so I added just a bit of HSL saturation.
Oh, finally got a raw file with a CFA black subtract to test my new logic; works! Thanks for that opportunity…
It actually was a rather red evening. But I like your edits nontheless!
That’s pretty close! Oddly enough, on my screen the original JPG looks a bit less saturated than yours, or the ones by @age and @agriggio. Maybe that’s a color space issue?
DSCF6840.RAF.xmp (23.4 KB)
My attempt at matching the jpg, used heavy exposure correction, some contrast equalizer ton adjust the cloud and mainly “filmic rgb” and “haze removal” to tweak the dynamic. Colorwise I tried to fine tune the color balance and tweaked the sky with color zones and velvia with a mask.
This is utterly fascinating. I must at this point confront that my initial thesis “Fuji colors are hard to recreate” is wrong. Even from my own experimentation for this thread, they seem actually pretty straight-forward to recreate.
So I wonder how I formed that impression? Perhaps it was prompted by one of the other color profiles? Or by “more difficult” high dynamic range images? Or simply by sub-par pictures that I couldn’t rescue, which had nothing to do with colors?
At any rate, thank you all for your help! This has been very interesting already!
It goes to almost any mechanism: once you peel back the layers of “make-nice” so the essential dynamics are evident, then most mechanisms are easy to understand. Except quantum mechanics; Lord knows what’s going on in there…
Funny, the very best advice I’ve recently seen in this regard is in a post in the thread I read immediately before coming here, attributable to @Soupy:
I think a whole lotta good old fashioned marketing may have something to do with it. That’s all I heard about when researching Fuji before I took the plunge. “The colors! The colors! You just can’t replicate the colors!” Yeah, I get the same results with my D700 and even my old D90 files. All of it is hype with very little substance.
I know I’m late to the party, but here’s my quick go:
