Sometimes, Fuji photos look freaky dark with blown highlights

Software darktable
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For the last few months, I found some of my Fuji images to be incredibly frustrating to edit in Darktable. 99% of my images would look fine, but there would be maybe on percent of images with horribly crushed shadows and irretrievably blown highlights that were almost impossible to edit. As far as I can tell, it only affected Fuji files.

Fast forward a few weeks and I find out that resetting the history solves the problem and the images look normal again. I am terribly confused by this.

Fast forward to today where I stumble upon the issue again and actually investigate: It turns out, in the Input Color Profile, the Color Profile was set to sRGB instead of Rec2020 RGB. Reset this, and everything is back to normal.

So, for now, I still don’t know the cause of the issue. The affected images are sometimes part of a series, and are not different from the rest of the series at all. But if you do sometimes see images that are almost black and white even though they shouldn’t be, have a look at the Input Color Profile.

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Hi Bastion,
Thanks for posting. Have the same experience (Darktable 3.2.1 flatpack running on Linux Mint). I cannot get a grip on the criteria when DT applies the sRGB input profile. Looks random.
Wonder what the appropriate standard/best input profile for fujifilm should be. The ‘standard color matrix’ shows more vibrancy in green compared to linear Rec2020 RGB.

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If you don’t know what the input profile should be or why you’ve changed it, it should be the standard color matrix.

I also shoot a Fuji, and I haven’t run across this. Perhaps you both have a subtle bug, or perhaps it is just an errant mouse movement.

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Others have reported this issue:

In short, when you open a jpeg file, the input color profile was being set to sRGB, as expected. However if you then go and edit a raw, the input color profile wasn’t being set back to “standard matrix”, which is what you normally need when you are working with a raw file.

It is fixed in the current development release.

3 Likes
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I get the same problem. I’ll open a folder of raw files and the entire folder is crazy under exposed. Go back to a folder that I know was good and it’s fine. I try resetting the history stack but still the problem persists.

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That sounds like a different issue, to be honest.

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I looked through the linked thread and my problem matches what is discussed there. I shoot almost solely in raw. Only the few folders that had jpgs were messed up. When I check those underexposed photos, the input colour profile is sRGB and setting back to standard fixes the issue.

Glad I know how to fix it now! :slight_smile:

2 Likes
8

This sentence was what made me think it would be a different issue. Try discarding the history in the library view. That should work.

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Might it be that you use digikam? I always get the issue when digikam produces an xmp sidecar file before darktable opens the raw file for the first time. For some reason than the display referred modules AND the scene referred modules are loaded in darktable. And this produces this very weird behaviour…

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For me the only thing that works reliably is to open the image press on processing step 0 and then compress history. Everything else keeps the scene referred module for some reason. Doing it from the light table usually does not work.