Let’s see what you can do!
Canon EOS5D mkII, Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM at 400mm, f:5,6
These files are licensed Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
IMG_2978.CR2.xmp (34.1 KB)
eos5d2_Sunlight_D50_WB.icc (58.2 KB)
I did not use your supplied D50_WB ICC file, used the EOS 5DII - Faithful DCP file from Adobe DNG instead, these colours are just a bit nicer to start with compared to the alternatives.
Anyway, thanks for sharing. This one has some nice challenges.
EDIT
Re-edit after a, very justified, comment from @dim. I wont remove the first edit otherwise dim’s reply further down wont make any sense.
Fixed the colour cast (what was I thinking…). Also spend a bit more time on noise reduction, contrast and sharpening.
Thanks @dim for the critique, don’t like it but I’m to blame and it is correct. I can only appreciate this being pointed out!
And another one. Completely new edit and different approach:
Thank you for sharing this photograph.
GIMP. Mainly I have emphasised the reflections in the water and adjusted contrast in various zones using my equal luminosity mask multi plug-in.
I think there is a cyan-green shift, in your try. Look at the deep blue plumes, on the wings of female’s duck (colvert). And some blur noise, in the dark parts (in the raw). The scene remains flat, it lost his 3dimensionality.
Edited my initial version and added it to my original reply. Left the original as is so your comment still makes sense.
A playraw with a supplied camera profile… had to dig in!
I typically use the libraw- or camconst-supplied matrix for a camera as a baseline, and the supplied profile is definitely a bit warmer, with increases color saturation. I also have SSF data from three sourcs for this camera; the camspec profile crushed the shadows too much for my taste, as well as introducing yellow into the rich green duck head.
But i like duck feathers as a monochrome texture, so I went a different way with my rendition. I grayscaled the image, all red channel, then cropped, curved, and ludicrous sharpen to get this:
If I had more time, I’d just export a linear tiff and work it in GIMP with all the rich tools available to damage an image… 
Love the grain (noise) in this B&W rendition!
It looks good like this. I think it would look even nicer with a more random pattern to the sharpness/noise, almost like a film shot.
How does the camera profile help in terms of editing compared to not having one?
Simply said: Having an ICC or DCP colour profile that is specific for a camera type (sensor et al.) helps with converting the camera’s sensor data to the RGB colour space used by your editor.
The colour space used by a modern digital camera is bigger then the (internal, working) colour space used by your editor (ProPhoto RGB or rec 2020/2100 in most cases). If you have a camera specific colour profile it is easier to map to this smaller colour space and colours for example will be more realistic represented.
Yeah, I did this with convolution sharpening. There are better such effects in GIMP…
Thank you for the explanation, it makes a lot of sense. I guess these profiles often get sent to the various companies like Adobe, Phase One etc, but not open to the public?
These profiles aren’t open source and most profiles that are available out-of-the-box in FOSS editors are created and tested by dedicated developers/users.
You can get them if you download and install Adobe DNG Converter (which is free, but not open source). This comes with Adobe’s Standard profiles and many, many Camera (type) specific profiles. Like the Vivid, Landscape, Neutral/Natural, Flat, Monochrome etc profiles that can be set in-camera. I looked at one of your PlayRaw topics and you seem to have an X-T3 which means that you would be limited to the Adobe Standard profile. Not sure why that is.
These are DCP profiles, though, and cannot be used in darktable (which is limited to ICC profiles). To my knowledge there are no DCP to ICC converters. There is, see @paperdigits’s reply below.
You can create camera specific profiles yourself, which is what @dim did looking at the above ICC profile. I have done/do this: How to Create DCP Color Profiles. This is DCP specific, though. Most of the info comes from this site: DCamProf - a digital camera profiling tool. There’s also info about creating ICC profiles (which are rather limited when comparing to DCP profiles) if I remember correctly.
Maybe @dim can point you to the ICC creation info that he used if you are interested.
Thank you for the thorough explanation. The Rawpedia link was specially revealing. Up until now I had only heard about ICC and not DCP. Coming to this forum really brings a lot of benefits when it comes to learning all these things, which seem mostly hidden through abstractions in other, more commercial, raw developers and image processors.
Unfortunately I don’t have a color checker yet so I wouldn’t be able to make my own profiles.
