Real raw profile

Hi! While RawTherapee provides a neutral profile when opening RAW files, I don’t see how to edit nearly-original, un-sharpened photo.
This should be possible. When using digiKam, it appears to do just that when you uncheck some boxes, so the image you see is a) very neutral-color and b) fuzzy as has not any sharpening aplied.
But I can’t mimic this with RawTherappe. Even with neutral profile, image is heavily sharpened and colors are vivid.
I use Nokia 9 PureView, so no color profile to play with, but digiKam doesn’t need those anyway.
And I think is the same story with older Lumia 1020 (color profiles available) as well.
Thank you for your help.

Hi:

When you apply the Neutral profile, you turn off every tool but demosaicing and white balance. I doubt you will get any closer than that in any raw developer. That is, the raw image is only demosaiced and white balanced. No sharpening applied at all.

You may wish to upload a comparison of both results for people here to judge and guess what’s happening.

It would also be appropriate that you upload the pp3 file of the image that is «heavily sharpened and colors are vivid». That way we can see what tools are indeed turned on.

To my knowledge input profiles don’t apply any sharpening, but may apply some tone mapping (if the profile has been designed to do so). Input profiles are mainly for color accuracy.

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Xavier your are absolutely right. It’s the auto-match profile what misled me as its far closer to neutral than to the camera output. So I was led to think the neutral profile was doing little.
But now I understand this similitude is not an issue either. Looks like the camera does image stacking for jpeg only, not RAW, so there won’t be such a jpeg-like output that can be used by any RAW program, as image stacking will be skipped.
Now I can’t believe I could think neutral profile was doing heavy processing! 8-). Side by side, differences couldn’t be more dramatic.
For the sake of curiosity, I share some examples.
Here Jpg and neutral dng


Then ‘auto-match low ISO’. As far I can tell just colors a bit more saturated. Still lovely natural compared to jpg.

Neutral profile works perfect.
Thank you very much.

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It won’t have the stacking as you say as its only doing that for the jpg as far as you know…the auto match when turned on tries to use the embedded JPg as a guide and doe some histogram balancing. Others might know the math but I believe that is the action. Neutral should be pretty plain and it you turn off demosaic you can see the green monster of the “real” raw file…