Which Input Profile to choose?

Software RawTherapee
21

Gosh, this topic is still very dense, to me. I believe I have several misunderstandings and many questions.

  1. I think the Rawpedia section about Color Management deserves some review with the elements discussed here (and your valuable articles @ggbutcher),
  2. same goes for the tooltips in RT.

Apart from that, I primarily use RT to edit photos taken with a Nikon D750. And I have two use case scenarii:

  1. scan and invert colour negative (and some positive) film, backlit with an LED panel, in the film negative module
  2. take normal photos and process them

And recently, I’ve been trying to make some HaldCLUT files for the film simulation module.

So for each case, I need to carefully think about the Color Management section.

  1. Negative film: since I’ve made a camera profile (with an embedded tone curve) with dcamprof for my LED light source, cf. how to create a dcp for an artificial light source I tick all checkboxes (tone curve, base table, look table)
  2. Normal photos: I’m kind of confused by the tone curve and look table options. I’m not sure what I’m allowing to be baked in, honestly — for instance, the “tone curve”, I’d love to understand from whence it comes, whatever it is. Does the .dcp for my camera contain one?

Now, say I take a picture of a colorchecker in D50-like conditions. What are the Color Management settings in RT that should be applied to get the expected gradation on the grey scale (other than initially doing the WB)?

Sorry for reviving this thread and thanks for reading me.

EDIT:
2023-05-24:
(1). colour negatives were not discussed, yet.
(2). simple answer: for a neutral basis (proper gradation and colours), only use the base table of the profile that’s shipped with RT. The Look Table and Tone Curve options can have obscure origins, depending on how the .dcp was made in the first place, so you don’t really know what you’re applying.

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