Yesterday I took some pictures and then had difficulties to get the sky’s color right.
Today I reproduced this setup for a reference photo. My camera’s WB is set to Auto. The JPEG out of camera looks correct concerning the real color of the sky. In RT it looks terrible. I can adjust the color of the sky playing around with white balance, but then the owl looks terrible. Anyway, I think that the colors should be (near) ok without adjusting anything.
I’d want to develop the photos in RT but at the moment I must do it in DPP. Maybe you can help me to find out what’s the problem here?
Not sure that the base problem is WB. My screen colorpicker has the RT sky Hue at top right as 225 deg, and the other two as 215 deg - only 10 degs different - not much for a sky.
Since there is a color checker in the image, I would adjust something other than WB to get correct colors for that, let the sky color fall where it may, save the PP3 and use that for the shot without the checker.
nota bene: Sky colors can look quite different even when their Hues are the same or similar, Saturation and Lightness being just as important.
Might be worth trying the various raw conversion methods in RT to see if the sky looks better or the color checker looks more as it should.
A quick fix might be the AutoMatch tone curve which tries to match the embedded JPEG.
Off to play with your raw …
… In RT the various raw methods made little difference so I left it at default. Under demosaicing the white point adjustment made a big difference, voila, the sky no longer “looks terrible”:
But it also is very different from the real sky color at the time I shot the photo. The JPEG ooc shows the colors of the sky as they should be. And I am not able to make a conversion that fits.
Edit: Also the bush in the background right to the owl lost color. And the photo is much darker overall.
I did not submit the image for a critique, only to show the effect of that slider - which you should be capable of adjusting yourself to your own satisfaction.
You could try using one of the Adobe .dcp profiles for your camera as a starting point. How to get LCP and DCP profiles - RawPedia
This is what it looks like with an m2 Landscape dcp profile I had on hand (it may not be the correct one for your camera) using the default white balance and an auto-matched tone curve in Film-like mode. You could also use the dcp tone curve instead of the auto-matched curve but in both cases they cause the blue channel to clip.
The problem I have is that I don’t know if colors in a photo are accurate or not. There are photos (most of them) that match the JPEGs out of camera, but others like this one don’t.
So how can I know if colors are correct? I have to compare with DPP and maybe to correct. This is time consuming. I guess others who use Canon cameras don’t suffer from this. I suspect it is an issue in my workflow or in the way I use RT. But I cannot find the reason for it.
If you absolutely need color accuracy, you should calibrate from a color target. This is the only way you can be sure.
Otherwise color is an artistic decision and I’d urge you not to worry about what is “real” or “accurate” and instead try and make something that satisfies your aesthetic desires.
My only camera was a Canon G15 for quite some time and I spent countless hours trying to reproduce the Canon jpeg colours before I gave up. In this particular image the jpeg colours don’t look very natural to me especially on the left hand side. Probably because the in-camera jpeg processing has clipped the blue channel. I did a quick process with the standard RawTherapee profile and a custom tone curve, which avoids clipping. It may help you home in on what you are looking for. DJI_0008.DNG.pp3 (14.0 KB)
Forgive the fact that I looked at your image in darktable. It opens with a very similar color to RT. The way I tried to chase the out of camera jpg look was to increase the chroma of the sky and lighten it by selected using the color zone module. I suspect RT has a similar tool that you could use.
Yes, darktable has (automatic) support for some very specific brands of color checkers. I have one that is supported and it is pretty easy to use, though the color checker itself was a bit pricey.
@cedric I only set by eye using my screen in split window mode to see the posted JPG and DT in another window. I not sure the JPGs sky represents the real world but I made that my target for this exercise.
