I took a picture of a flower and by tweaking the RAW image from my Fujifilm X-T4 I’m trying to figure out just what kind of magic the camera does to produce the JPEG it produces.
Notably, in the RAW-produced image:
The window frame is more or less neutral gray, like in the in-camera JPEG
The leaves are more or less the same hue and saturation as the in-camera JPEG
The flower is dull brown instead of saturated orange-red, like in the in-camera JPEG (and in real life, too).
Trying to correct the flower saturation/hue expectedly ruins the rest, unless I isolate it with masks, after which I can do whatever I want, but that’s not the point. I’m not trying to produce this particular image, I’m just using it as a learning exercise.
A few questions:
Am I missing something in Darktable’s toolkit that would help make the flower more punchy?
Is it crazy to assume that the camera can actually do something like saturate natural greens that happen to be within the focal range or even detect flowers and saturate/highlight those?
If it does so, may be it stores this mapping somewhere in the RAW, and Darktable could theoretically use this data?
What do you think of this one? The color calibration channel mixer is my secret weapon for this kind of thing, combined with sigmoid with the hue preservation dialed back a bit.
I actually cheated with this one, as I had a go at a similar photo a while back - I used a style I made then with a few tweaks. I still struggle initially to work out what I need to do in the channel mixer - it’s simple and complicated at the same time
But the channel mixer is basically the same thing as a a simple profile of sorts… sorry I’m not really that well up in the right terms. Edit no2: meaning that it’s well within what might be done in camera - I don’t think that it would apply different stuff depending on focus… not 100% sure.
Edit: I find legacy WB works better for matching jpgs usually - no CC for that purpose.
I am keen to hear what the developers might have to say about this image.
I played with Sigmoid, color calibration and lab adjustments in tone curves to get what I have here. I am not sure why DT is so different to the cameras JPG. DSCF5345_01.RAF.xmp (11.3 KB)
Terry, thanks for showing me Tone curves! Now with this use case they make much more sense to me, and I was able to tweak it the way I want (albeit with flimic + color balance rgb instead of sigmoid). And it answers my wondering if Fuji does anything terribly smart there: it probably just applies a very particular tone curve, and that’s it.
With RT, it starts much closer to the jpg but I had to use the channel mixer to get to the jpg colors. I don’t think the camera does anything fancy though, it’s mostly DT that interprets the colors a bit differently.
Terry why would you expect it to be… DT does not have the fuji profile or recipe by default. The closest is the basecurve and closer would be for a user to make their own basecurve or icc file…Beyond that you just have the raw data. Load the fuji file in some other raw editor as neutral or linear and that is basically what you are getting in DT. Also DT by design has all those little gamut controls to be “correct” … that’s not any part of the Fuji jpg with a wild red/yellow/orange flower
I think unless you shoot with some neutral profile then for sure something like a set of tone curves might be part of the fuji profile and so would be what you are reconstructing when you have to employ them. The good thing is for many that there a quite a few people out there that have taken a run at creating Fuji profiles using styles, luts, CLUT etc so you can also explore those as options to help to capture that look…
Looking in the meta data I think this uses a Provia profile… there is a preset in the CLUT module… if you add the basecurve set color pres to none and apply that preset with lens correction and denoise profiled… you get a pretty close match… if that was the goal to be close to the jpg…
Thanks Todd for the response. I was hoping a developer could supply insight and this this answer seems to explain it. I know from the days of film , photographing red flowers was tricky for the medium because there were colors not visible to the eye but visible to the film. I am not sure if something similar contributes to the problem here. It is also hard to edit when I have not seen the original flower.
DT puts the raw in raw processor :)… Others do try to mimic the jpg and or camera profile and as commercial entities they likely have arrangements and access to some of that information. For example I have ON1 and it sues ICC files…it hides the build in ones I think I took a quick look one time but basically if you have an icc with lut and tone curve your going to get that rich red/orange that is similar to what got pumped into the jpg, but often it is out of gamut and just using the gamut compression slider on these can remove some of that and reveal a bit of detail that gets lost in the over saturation…in any case none of these things are things you can’t do in DT its just not a primary goal of the software to provide baked in looks by default but there are ways and means to do so if you want… Actually I just drew the 50% exposure box on main flower. Used v5 filmic with not color preservation and set the latitude to 50% and sat to 10%… from there only a minor tweak in the color and brightness tabs of CC made the image virtually identical to the jpg so it was relatively easy…
I have taken on board from a previous comment of yours about Filmic V5. I mainly use V6 but have come to appreciate that sometimes V5 is the way to go. I personally don’t chase OOC jpg look as I want to handcraft images. I do however find it frustrating and counterintuitive that camera manufacturers won’t share the ICC profiles for their cameras with developers of DT and other programs. Surely it is in their commercial interest that everyone can process the images to look the best possible. BTW, Adobe would require a subscription from me to open this file as my perpetual licences for CS6 and LR6 will not open this file unless I use the Adobe DNG converter. This is one reason to move from commercial software to FOSS. Also DT is just so much better than LR in my opinion.
Very grateful for all the replies! Learned about tone curves and LUTs which I managed to avoid before.
@priort Thanks for pointing me towards the CLUT module and presets. May come handy if I ever in a similar situation. I mostly just edit for the look I want, but sometimes it just so happens that the camera gets it just perfect, and I’d rather copy than tweak
It was the out-of-camera JPEG in “fine” quality. I just didn’t expect this to be that much bigger
Everything is at their defaults. I pretty much only shoot in RAW, so I don’t set the camera up. I also have an anxiety towards setting things away from defaults in general, lest I forget what I tweaked and wouldn’t know why things behave in an unpredictable fashion.
