I see your point. However, as I understand it there is a lot of processing required to get a usable image from the raw sensor data and my assumption is that C1 and RT do it differently. Again, I am seeing a fundamental difference in the color rendering of the same file in C1 and RT without any user-applied color manipulation. So you are saying that what I like about the color rendering of C1 may just be a happy accident and not to expect it from RT because that is not how the file looks? I’ll have to think on that one. You may be right. But is there one and only one “correct and accurate” way to translate raw sensor data into a usable “starting point” image?
One thing I did discover today is that the color in the mantis image in RT changes (for the better) if I add some haze removal. That was quite a surprise and I’m not sure why that would be. Without haze removal, the mantis image looks cold and nothing like it does in C1 and I am unable to duplicate my C1 results. But if I add a moderate amount of haze removal, the image warms up and comes very close to how it appears in C1. I would even call the image “acceptable”. Note that I do have a small amount of “clarity” added in C1 by default which I think is doing something similar to RT’s haze removal. However, removing or modifying the “clarity” in C1 does not affect the color at all.
Haze removal does not seem to have much (if any) effect on the color in the high ISO room image, though. Not sure why it makes a difference in the mantis image and not the room image.
I think this is where the hang up is. When you apply nothing in RT, its really nothing, and we know its nothing because we can inspect the code. When you open an image in C1 with nothing applied, there are things applied… But what? We can’t really know. So “no use applied color manipulation” isn’t an apples to apples to comparison. There probably isn’t a way to do a “no.processing” apples-to-apples comparison between RT and C1.
Different tools have different trade offs. You may need more work for RT or just to find which tools you like and to get a good starting profile.
Agreed. I have always assumed that the path from my original file to the “un-manipulated” first look in both programs was different. The point (for me) of this dialog is trying to identify what that difference is and how to control it. I get that it might be more work in RT, and why that might be. What escapes me so far though is how to get there. I’m getting closer, but I’m not there yet. I can see and identify what I don’t like but I have not found a way to fix it yet.
Well, no. There are multiple ways to interpolate the raw sensor pattern to form a full size RGB image. I don’t think you have a choice for the demosaicing algorithm in C1, but there are multiple options in RT.
However the thing that influences colour the most is the calibrated conversion taking place that maps the raw sensor data to RGB pixel values. This calibration may be different in different software.
You can always try and produce your own calibrated conversion profile, which may help to correct the colour cast you perceive. How to create DCP color profiles - RawPedia
Fact is that the current RT’s dcp profile gives consistently redish-yellowish greens … see measures on dpreview’s studio scene …
(I just tuned raw white point to take the expected value on the neutral grey patch)
Interesting… maybe if the DCP for this camera were removed from RT’s search path, it would then go to the camconst.json entry, which is referenced to the Adobe DCP, and looks okay when I use it in rawproc. @pgoelz, you might try this…
Well … after some years without touching “color science” … I forgot something critical … that (as Torger wrote back then) measures are better with the “Look table” unchecked
Is that conversion a linear process or are curves involved? I’m guessing it is non-linear, since I have not been able to quite get what I want simply by changing the three color channel gains or black points.
Aha, this post put me on to the cause and cure for my dissatisfaction with how my images look in RT. RT has a profile for the Sony a6000 but it does not for the a6500. However, the default apparently is to use “camera standard” in both cases. At least the “camera standard” setting propagated into my default profile. And “camera standard” is NOT a good fit for the a6000 or a6500. Setting it to “auto matched camera profile” for the a6000 and “no profile” for the a6500 gives me very acceptable coloration in both my test images, as well as many others I tried. And actually. setting it to “no profile” gets me close enough that I’m happy.
So… I think we can put this thread to bed. With the correct profile selected (or no profile if there is none) my images look great… just about exactly the same as I can get in C1 (including the high ISO shot). Now if RT or someone could generate an a6500 profile, all would be perfect.
Great discussion! And gratefully free of pedantry and rancor… all too common on the 'net these days.
Paul
EDIT: I was hoping to be able to select “auto matched camera profile” in my saved default profile and then have it default to “no profile” if it did not find a camera profile (like for my a6500). However, if it does not find a profile when set to “auto matched camera profile” it defaults to “camera standard”. So my compromise is to save my default profile with it set to “no profile”. Looks good enough.
There is two conversion steps that you’ve actually already found out by now: first is a simple matrix operation that transforms the ‘camera colour space’ to a ‘real’ colour space. Then there can be (but not necessarily is) a lookup table that does some specific camera profiling. See for more details: DCP FIles
Now, when you select “No profile” in RT, afaik, you skip both steps. This is really not recommended. See Color Management - RawPedia
The best thing to do if you don’t like the “Camera standard” or “Auto matched camera profile” options, is to produce a DCP profile of your own, like @paperdigits suggests. See here how to do that: How to create DCP color profiles - RawPedia
This is the only way to guarantee accurate colours for your images. Anything else would be added flavour to your own liking.
One more thing OP could do is install the Adobe DNG Converter to get access to Adobe Standard DCP profiles for the Sony cameras – they’re quite OK as a starting point, and they’re dual-illuminant so pretty universal.
When setting up a general purpose RT profile for Sony a6400 I did the following in order to imitate the Lightroom default look:
The Adobe Baseline Exposure setting from the DCP profile isn’t respected in RT and the PV2012 (3) has highlight protection, so change the following when using Adobe DCP profiles: tick all the input profile boxes, in Exposure tab disable Auto-matched curve, set Exp. Comp. to 0.35 (Adobe Baseline Exposure value for a6400), Highlight Compression 30/Thresh.0, Black 150, Shadow Compression 20. Highlight reconstruction might be ON (Blend) – use higher Highlight Compression values for active reconstruction of highlights.
In the raw tab, use the double demosaicing AMaZE+VNG. Use Capture Sharpening instead of the R-L Deconvolution sharpening – set the lens corner blur mitigation if your lens needs it; it’s similar to what DxO and C1 offer in this respect. Watch out for false colour suppression in demosaicing settings – unless there’s really problematic moire don’t use values above 1 when there are small, red elements in the photo. Demosaicing border value set at 12 to get 6000x4000 dimensions. You could add some Contrast by Detail Levels: set Level 0 at 1.50 for input sharpening (like Structure slider in C1).
I also tweak my colours for anti-green skin tones (I like to use the Vibrance tool for that), anti-magenta skies (I use HSV Equalizer), and juicy foliage (I use Color Toning for that). I usually do use the Look table from the DCP profile but for some reason RT desaturates colours too much when using it, so I compensate by using Lab saturation.
Save all of this as a processing profile and apply to all your photos so that you have a nice starting point for some small additional tweaks like WB, tone-mapping, etc.
Thanks you for all the above! Last night I unpacked the downloaded DNG converter executable and saved the various DCP files. Note that at least on my Windows PC, simply installing the program did NOT place the DCP files anywhere on my hard drive. I saw them unpack, but they were nowhere to be found after installation. However, if you add a .zip file extension to the downloaded .exe file, you can unzip the file with 7zip and get access to the contents.
I also found that after installing the DNG converter, it was not on the list of installed programs and was therefore not uninstallable through Control Panel. To remove it, I simply deleted the files from the Program Files and App Data folders. I wonder if it needed to be installed as administrator?
My first impression is that I didn’t like the results using the standard a6500 profile. However, I have not tried them all and I will also try your steps above to see if I can generate an overall “starting point” RT profile. In the mean time, using “no profile” really looks pretty good on every image I have tried it on. Way better than “camera standard”.
I have not fully tested this yet, but it seems that RT looks for a camera specific profile of a specific file name? So if I have more than one DCP file, it will only automatically select the one with the exact filename it is looking for? You can manually apply a “custom” profile of a different name. Last night that seemed to be how it worked, anyway.
Unless you want to use DNG converter, the simple way on Windows to use the different profiles (DCP or LCP) is first to change the type of file from exe to zip. Then with 7zip find the location of the profiles in the zip and extract it where you want. Nothing to install.
On my system they go directly to C:\ProgramData\Adobe\CameraRaw\CameraProfiles\Adobe Standard
I prefer starting from the Adobe Standard rather than the Camera Standard profiles.
No, I don’t think there’s an uninstaller for the DNG Converter so the manual removal is the way to go.
Yes, this part is pretty subjective – I like the Adobe Standard variety because it gives me a similar starting point for my cameras, so I’ve learnt to do some similar moves to optimize the look I’m after. But I also make my own custom profiles with DCamProf, and it gives me more neutral colours when I need it.
As said before – the no input profile option is not the way to go, but if it gives you what you want, then why not…
I don’t think it auto-select the input profile – C1 and Lr do this, but in RT and in DxO you need to direct the program to a particular profile, which it then remembers. But if you save the processing profile, it will include the specific input profile you chose.
Hmmm… I didn’t think to look in the Program Data folder since the Windows search function did not turn them up after searching my entire hard drive. But you are correct… when I specifically looked, there they were. Apparently Windows Search does not search the Program Data folder even when you start at the C: root.
Setting a specific camera profile might work if I only had one camera. But I have the a6000 and the a6500 so I need to have the program auto select (which it does, BTW). If you hover over the camera auto select feature, the pop up box explains it. I also checked and the a6000 profile is not good for the a6500 and vice versa. I have now tried them all and I think I prefer the “neutral” over the “standard” so I have a new default profile with the “neutral” profile renamed as “SONY ILCE-6500.dcp” and placed in the profiles folder… and life is good
As to the studio scene - is that the incandescent or is that the “daylight” version?
A limitation of DPR’s studio test scene is that the “daylight” shots cannot be used for profiling. As discussed in rawpedia’s instructions on profiling, a high-CRI LED or CFL bulb will NOT generate a valid D50 profile.
As to profiling with a colorchecker - a bit of followup to my earlier discussion with @Morgan_Hardwood - I got lucky yesterday and we had sun! So I have A6300 and A6500 noon winter sun shots. A question though - the instructions talk about trying to avoid an environment with reflections, how much would snow reflections throw off the profile? (that will be unavoidable for a while…)
I’m hoping to take StdA shots tonight before packing up for the holidays to provide to Morgan.
One question Morgan - I noticed that the instructions given on rawpedia also will generate a LookTable in addition to a HueSatMap - but at least the DCPs I see for the A7M3 only have the HueSatMap. What dcamprof options were used for the A7M3 DCPs? Over the holidays I might submit some updates to rawpedia based on my experiences with taking a crack at profiling, such as the benefits of argyll-scanin’s -F option.
could you elaborate on that?
in my (totally empirical, admittedly uninformed) experience, they work pretty well, but if you have evidence of the contrary I would be very happy to know. iirc (but I might be wrong) I’ve seen comments by @iliah_borg on dpreview suggesting that they would do the job fine…
… normally you should take much better metrics on this scene as your profile was built on this 
