Is there a setting to take away saturation from low saturated color areas and at the same time enhance the saturation of areas that already have quite strong color saturation?
@SaturnusDJ,
without providing a raw, you will have very little hope to receive a precise and valuable advice. It’s a blind guess.
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Yes, the Lab tools have CC curve = chromaticity as a function of chromaticity.
The demonstrated curve does what you ask.
Just to be sure : when you activated the DCP, where you on the neutral profile ?
Did you checked some of the box under the Setting?
For me it’s a goo d starting point with DCP, a little S curve on the LAB curve, a bit of black and Vibrance.
I had the same experience as you. When you use RT “out of the box” and open your first raw photo you become disappointed, and it is absolutely not easy to adjust your photo to something pleasing using all the different sliders and tools.
In fact in the beginning I found that RT was much more suited to process jpg photos simply because you are almost already there, so you just need a little fine tuning.
To me the breakthrough was to get an input profile under the colour management section as described in Rawpedias paragraph “General Photography”. And while you are at it get a lens correction profile too.
I use a Nikon D7100 and a custom input profile does wonders for you - but remember to disable auto levels or the result will not be useable.
Then you should create your own raw default profile. I adjusted the following for a low ISO profile:
• Exposure
• Shadow/highlights – local contrast
• Sharpening
• Input profile (as described above)
• Lens correction profile (as described above)
Good luck….
@gaaned92
Agreed. Maybe in a later stage. I have a bit trouble with the idea of the whole world wide web getting one of my nicest photo’s in weeks. Although I understand the pros of doing so.
@james
Thanks!
@keno40
DCP is on ‘camera standard.’
@obe
I use a D3300. Should I use the D3100 profile? And then DCP or ICC or no difference?
Don’t you think that the buildings in the downtown area are leaning backward? A probable cause is that the lens is not exactly parallel to the ground. It might be better if you do some `perspective correction’ in addition to improving colour and contrast.
Can you show us a screenshot ?
I meant pointing your DCP (taken from Adobe Camera Raw) as a custom color reference here : Color Management - RawPedia
I followed the guidelines in “How to get Nicon ICM-profiles” and used one of the profiles, the “D7100 Camera Neutreal.dcp” as Custom Input Profile and checked the Tone curve and Look table under the DCP section. You also get a landscape, portrait and standard profile. Try and see what you like the best.
These profiles are created when you open a photo using Capture NX-D, Capture NX 2 or ViewNX as described in the Rawpedia documentation . You can download these programs at no cost from Nikon.
Ok this topic is getting a bit out of hand. It’s really cool how much activity this site has, very helpful and thanks everyone, but let’s go step by step.
First Sharpness/detail
As far as I know I tried everything I can think of. Profiles, all kinds of contrast settings, sharpness, noise reduction. But it’s still noisy, dirty, no smooth colors. The only way to get it clean is by using a lot of noise reduction which removes ‘the dirt’ but creates so much unsharpness that the main goal of getting more detail still isn’t reached.
Here is a different RAW/NEF from the same shoot. A bit different but the same things considering problem of missing detail apply. With the wide building above the train as reference.
RAW
DSC_0006.NEF (19.7 MB)
Gear: Nikon D3300 + 18-55mm VRII (kit)
@obe
Thanks I will extract the D3300 profile today.
Have you tried the Final Touchup panel in the Wavelet tab to increase apparent sharpness via local contrast?
Be careful not to do too much or halos may occur as I recently discovered (and almost got my head chopped off for it) 
@shreedhar sometimes it is necessary to decrease contrast in residual image in order to give some room.
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Ok I have got the neutral icc profiles from the Capture NX 2 software following the Wiki instructions.
One of the profiles gives the photo a red glow and extremely flat contrast, the other makes the photo really bright and without contrast. Adjusting seems very difficult and they just destroy the photo.
I gave it a try … applied a neutral input profile, did some highlight recovery … what is your problem? Is it possible that you just forgot to set a monitor ptofile?
DSC_0006.jpg.out.pp3 (11 KB)
An other try
Use of DNGConverter_9_12_1.zip$APPDATA\Adobe\CameraRaw\CameraProfiles\Camera\Nikon D3300\Nikon D3300 camera neutral.dcp
DSC_0006.NEF.pp3 (10.6 KB)
Here is a combination of RT and GIMP. To get some three dimensionality I made the railway tracks a bit more brown so that the cool colours of the sky and buildings look distant.
5addaa20a006c519760a52b8ff59589676118625.jpg.out.pp3 (11.7 KB)
Hi’ SaturnusDJ
I am sorry. I forgot that I got the profiles from installing the Adobe DNG converter as described in Rawpedia under the paragraph “How to get LCP and DCP profiles”.
@obe
Np of course! I think I did that a while ago so I still got those profiles for my D3300.
I kept trying and finally I can say that I am closer to Aperture concerning the feeling/emotion/atmosphere the image gives.
The game changer was
Curve=1;0;0;0.58461538461538409;0.54230769230769182;0.76382225751876831;0.68286071905722934;1;1;
At the same time I am thinking more and more that the Aperture plus Paint.NET combi is a bit of a lucky one. With the addition of the curve in RT and then doing levels in Paint.NET the result is much better. Manual leveling makes it even better. What would be the best tool in RawTherapee to control the colors in such way as the image below?
Hopefully Paint.NET can be omitted then.
Here the full pp3 for anyone wanting to look up the details.
DSC_9982_xRT_33.tif.out.pp3 (10.2 KB)
Output:
Open this one with the previous two from yesterday in browser tabs and switch between them to see the improvement. Technically it’s even richer than the Aperture version now.
As you can see, the new output still has a lot of noise compared to the Aperture output. No improvement at all.