I recently bought a new camera, a Nikon Zf, and, for the first time, I’ve started using in-camera Picture Controls seriously. I fount it has made me a better photographer, allowing me to find compositions and moods I would likely have ignored otherwise.
That said, this has created a workflow problem, RawTherapee doesn’t make it easy to preserve or replicate the “feel” of these Picture Controls when working with RAW files.
My first question is conceptual: Why doesn’t there seem to be a reasonably set of PP3 / style / HaldCLUT profiles aiming to approximate the Picture Controls of major camera manufacturers (Nikon, Canon, etc.)?
I understand that these looks are proprietary and that a perfect replication is impossible. But it seems plausible that a skilled raw editor could get 90–95% of the way there, and this strikes me as a common enough problem that someone would have tackled it already.
Is that assumption wrong? Is there something fundamentally flawed in my understanding or in my workflow?
It’s a good idea. I actually think replicating picture controls would be a good way to flex one’s Raw editing skills. Maybe I’ll try it myself. I think the reason why it’s not more common is because most people want to go off on their own direction, and it’s a bit of a grunt work with not too much reward. One would have to take several shots, JPEG and Raw and then tune the style until it matches the picture control very carefully.
But it sounds like a cool exercise because I believe it would definitely help anyone who tries it to gain insight into Raw editing and into new ways of doing things…okay, I think I’ll try it.
I did get those. I don’t understand them completely (maybe you help me?) but as far as I understand these are just defining the color profile for decoding the raw image applying them don’t return me the desired effect.
When I tried applying a monochrome profile, for example, I didn’t end up with a monochrome picture.
I tried doing this. It does not work with png, it does work with tif but even them it won’t apply a picture control on it it requires a raw profile. I even tried converting the tif to dng as the rawpedia recommends but even them it won’t apply the profiles.
I spent more time on this than I care to admit, mostly learning about raw processing tools and color-management terminology. My goal is to mimic Nikon’s “Standard” Picture Control on a DPReview studio scene.
Open it in NX Studio, set Picture Control = Standard.
Export as 8-bit TIF.
Process the same RAW in RawTherapee, using the Adobe DCP profile (tone curve + LUT enabled).
Compare RawTherapee output vs NX Studio, focusing on brightness histograms and comparing the color palettes present in the photo.
Using the Adobe DCP got me roughly 80% of the way there. However, there is a systematic problem I cannot solve.
The problem
In RawTherapee, the highlights are strongly compressed near white. They are not clipped, but they are squeezed away from the upper end of the tone range.
I tried to correct this by computing a tone curve that maps RawTherapee’s histogram to NX Studio’s histogram. The curve works very well over most of the tonal range, but it cannot reconstruct this compressed highlight region, here is the resulting histogram:
Am I missing something? Is this behavior expected? Maybe a feature of Rawtherapee’s pipeline? Maybe there is a tool to get around this behavior or maybe there is just as far as I can get in my quest to mimick the photo produced by another software.
I would appreciate any comment or feedback on this.
