Yes, the problem is probably the fact that your screen is not capable of displaying very saturated colors - what kind of display do you have? Plus the JPEG is probably in sRGB, which is too small to display certain shades of red.
If you need to be in sRGB there is no other way than reducing saturation in the reds - the resulting color might not be so similar to the real thing, but more pleasing to the human eye.
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@priort : Do watch out for the small blown spot top left (turning on highlight recovery should be enough). But besides that: Nice edit.
You’re probably right. I was being lazy and using my laptop screen. Looking at the same (JPEG) photo by viewing this thread on another screen produces much more vivid reds… but I don’t have Darktable there. The brighter parts of the petals still look pink though… which the real ones don’t.
Food for thought. My main thought at the moment is “don’t photograph such difficult flowers” 
I also took a couple of photos with a 35mm camera which is currently loaded with Kodak Gold 200. It willl be interesting to compare those… but there will be no instant gratification there because there are loads of frames left on the film.
Thanks …that was a nasty little spot. I was so focused on the flowers I didn’t really notice it
…in the end I just did a quick and dirty retouch to hide it…
Similar issue from a year ago…
The problem with vibrant flowers is they are often out of gamut. Our cameras capture them just fine, but monitors, most of which can only display srgb, can’t display their full saturation. When colours are out of gamut, they get shunted back in gamut for display. This can either lead to clumpiness/posterization and loss of fine detail, or hue shift such as red towards Magenta. The only ideal solution is monitors with bigger gamuts. Short of that, if you want to retain detail you need to desaturate, but then they look dull. In the other thread @priort linked to above I found the best way to deal with them was to avoid boosting exposure much, or at all. Watch the waveform and ensure you don’t push the red channel above clipping.
The gamut compression slide is a nice assist as well… or can be…playing with that and selective tonal chroma, saturation and brilliance tweaking in rgb CB usually give something pleasing at least if not accurate…
Throwing a LUT on is another way to see if you can massage the color… some nice greens and reds I think with these ones
sunny_rich.zip (116.4 KB)
PhotoFlow + G’MIC
Take 1
Take 2 (looks better with darker background - by default, the forum’s is white)
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It’s probably not the camera but the output medium (display). If you have a highly saturated red hue with a high dynamic range in luminosity it is nearly impossible to get a realistic representation on an 8 bit sRGB display.
Thanks again all. The WB was definitely off - it seems to have guessed 4800K. My guess is at the sunniest end of overcast - 6500K.
Some of the renderings above seem to be heading too much into yellow/orange for my taste which makes the flowers look like they are ‘going over’.
I hadn’t spotted the little bright patch - I guess this must be the sky reflecting from the edge of the waxy leaf because there is nothing bright behind the plant.
I take the point about the higher gamut monitors and limitations of sRGB but I like to share my better photos online so I guess I will need to live with ‘average’ display equipment and either accept dull red flowers or stick to photographing the less tricky ones. Sometimes I get things printed too… which is probably even worse for gamut.
there are two problems. the input device transform and the limited output gamut (srgb). if you look at this vkdt screengrab:
you’ll see the default processing using the D65 dng matrix and in the top right corner you’ll observe that much of the red is outside the smallest shaded triangle there (rec709/srgb), although within rec2020.
if i use an estimated ssf profile, i get this (at 6000k wb):
which still shows reds outside of gamut, but not nearly as pronounced as before.
take the images as illustrations with a good grain of salt: they are colour managed for my screen (not yours). so they will give you a rough idea, but the hard data is in the plot (top right corner).
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Take 1 without converting to sRGB standard (rec2020 linear → rec2020 standard[?]). The colours are darker and have been shifted further but reveal more detail in the flowers. Zoom for better viewing and contrast.
[?] sRGB curve?
Combining all that, we have
Take 3 – zoom to appreciate
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I had another go myself… looking at the real thing through the window. I couldn’t quite live with the 6500K white balance - it still makes the flower look too orange so played with it a bit more… 5500 seemed too blue so I spit the difference and 6000K seems (to my eyes) to be not terrible.
I think my main other changes are -0.45EV exposure, a color balance RGB preset based on ‘add basic colorfulness’ but with everything halved and then pushed global saturation up by 7.3%.
The brighter parts of the petals are trigger a clipping warning with ‘any RGB channel’. If I set the warning to ‘full gamut’ then the whole thing becomes a mess (which seems to be saturation) but I’ll live with it.
The real thing still looks a lot better 
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Hi Halina3000. I have encountered the same problem. Red flowers can be problematic. Many digital camera sensors have difficulty detecting subtleties at the red end of the spectrum. I’ve never been able to get truly satisfactory results when photographing red flowers. I end up having to make do with less than perfect. Some tweaking in Darktable or similar can sometimes help slightly, but unfortunately, there’s nothing much that can be done to obtain faithful realism when colour information is actually missing, due to the camera sensor’s limitations.
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I found that the red channel gets blown easily with red flowers, and that makes editing afterwards difficult.
In addition, there may be a bit of UV in many flower colours, which the camera can detect (as blue), but we don’t.
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