Why all this yellow in highlights?

Interesting… That certainly works. Personally, I much prefer to retain the colour temperature differences both because that’s how it looks in real life and I think it adds a lot the shot. But that’s only my preference :slightly_smiling_face:

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Back on computer, I like the detail you’ve brought out in the foreground trees in this one.

I use Firefox so that’s certainly a difference… could be!

I decided to have another go where I set the white balance to daylight and then used rgb curves to add a little yellow back in. I also did multiple exposure instances using a gradient on the tress to brighten them a little and a drawn path mask with lots feathering and blur to darken the sunlit peak. I suspect the desired color could easily be obtainable in DT and as the posts here show there are many different approaches that one can take.


20230105_081247_0024_01.ORF.xmp (18.5 KB)

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20230105_081247_0024.ORF.xmp (9.8 KB)

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With the dark lower part and the space above the mountain, this would be an excellent basis for a movie poster, but I do not have a movie in mind yet.

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My version with DT4.2 Flatpak. Nice photo @solitone . Is it the Sommeiller peak?

It’s not the Sommeiller, but it’s pretty close to it. This one is Mount Chaberton.

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Fascinating conversation, could I interject - as a new comer to DarkTable and after a week of Youtube tutorial videos (thanks Bruce Williams!!) I am LOVING it! :blush: So… I’m going through my old catalogue and seeing how DT deals with ORF files as I’m thinking of going back to Olympus this year after a year or so just using the iPhone.

I can concur that all my images, after following the new scene referred workflow as the preferred method these days, have a reddish hue in some colours when compared to OOC JPEGS embedded in the RAW file. This is not something I seem able to change, its not an overall tint, it only applies to certain scene aspects and mostly effects browns and greens (they are too yellow compared to the Olympus OOC renderings.

Now, obviously I did read in the manual that RT is not going to try and add anything at all when it comes to rendering my visible images from the RAW data, it gives me a starting point (flat, desaturated images) and its up to me to make a look I want. But I did buy my last Olympus because (as is commonly mentioned) I loved the colours and the OOC rendition.

As an audiophile I find myself thinking of high fidelity and the quest for authenticity (nothing added nothing taken away) and how these days we much prefer to hear the equipment and how it renders the sound to our ears. Rather than heading off into the unreachable realms of true fidelity to the source (which in digital terms has no sound at all!) many of us have fallen in love again with valve amps, multi-bit DACs and even dare I say it, vinyl record players!!

So my question is, if we buy a camera because we love its signature look when it comes to OOC images (after all RAW doesn’t have a look and we can’t see RAW) and I’m thinking of Fuji and Olympus for example, how do I keep that look in all its glory, colour and other processing as well - yet still have a RAW file embedded with that look fully intact to work on if I need to push the parameters (such as noise reduction, rescuing clipped highlights etc.)?

Could I say use the Olympus software, which I hear is faithful to the in camera look as you might expect, and export this as a kind of uncompressed file DT could work with but with the look and feel of the original intact?

Just a thought, and thanks for indulging this newbie to DT and I do know its for geeks, made by geeks, which is ok as I’m a self confessed geek!! :blush:

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Welcome to the forum!

This sort of thing can usually be changed/fixed in my experience with delicate use of the channel mixer in the color calibration module, as this is the same process that goes into camera profiles and so on, but I’m aware that it’s not an intuitive thing to do! I still get confused…

If you wanted to post a jpg and Raw pair that show the difference I’m always up for a matching challenge :wink:

I certainly see your point, but it’s not really very practical- as far as I know!

I don’t think that’s possible, as the Oly look will be largely down to a tone curve, and dt, being primarily scene referred won’t work to it’s proper potential if that’s applied…

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Thanks Steven! At the moment I’m looking through my old Lightroom library originals and of course I discarded the full size JPEGs years ago. I’ve worked out however that DT shows the embedded JPEG as a thumbnail in the LightTable view, and also when you press ‘F’ for a full screen preview. So I set up a CMD-X comparison, LH view the embedded JPEG at screen size, RH view a duplicated copy that I’m editing.

So I’ve been editing a few example shots to see how I could create a Style to apply to a batch of ORFs, and when it comes to exposure, white balance (I have to leave this as Legacy to get the White Balance module to automatically set As Shot - otherwise it is way off), and using Filmic to adjust contrast I can get them very close. In fact the DT version is of course more accurate in the detail than the embedded JPEG which must be quite small and processed.

But as you can seem there is a definite lean towards yellow instead of the red hue that might be expected - not too worried its just that I want the Olympus colours and let DT fix whatever else I want to fix - which it is blooming marvellous at!

Just as an example for now, when I get my new camera I’l have some full size JPEG’s to drive myself nuts over! :blush:

Also here, but not so noticeable, on the wall in the background and the cobbles in the very bottom near foreground…

Not sure what the export options in the Olympus software are.
Other than that, yes, you can import an image file in dt to work on it. And most tools will work, including the ones expecting scene-referred data. But you will have to deal with the limitations from the input format and colour space (which can have limited dynamic range, or hard clipped data to a smaller gamut than the original raw).

Regarding the images you posted: if you want comments on them, or suggestions on how to reduce the yellow cast (which is visible over the whole image), you could perhaps post such an image as a playraw?

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Welcome to the forum, if you’re interested in getting a handle on how all this works you’re in the right place…

Personally, I chased the OOC JPEG look for about an hour, then abandoned it when I figured out some essential things about the whole raw processing chain. The most important one was being able to regard the basic linear, white-balanced RGB right out of demosaic as the starting point for all the discretionary things done to “make-nice”. And then, recogized that even that starting point had some discretion, in terms of the white balance and camera profiling.

And then, after years of farting around with all those gonkulators, I came to the fundamental realization I probably should have comprehended in the first place: the images we make are really just coarse approximations of the scene we shot. There are dozens of inter/extrapolations, compressions, and approximations required in a photographic workflow to produce a rendition on the limited media that even begins to tickle our eye/brain in a similar fashion to the original scene.

That OOC JPEG is just one path through the mousetrap, no less or more valid than a lot of others. The thing to achieve is understanding how each kink in that path makes the thing in the rendition in which you interested change, and master them…

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First thing…try legacy wb. If that seems to fix things then what the issue is most likely or could be are bad D65 values used by CC for wb. If you want to keep using CC then you need to correct these. If you have a calibrated monitor you can shoot and image of the screen and use a custom preset in CC with these values… This has been shown to be very helpful with Sony Panasonic and so maybe Olympus??.. I can dig up the video showing this if you find legacy improves things…if not there there are other factors at play…

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Darktable chart is also now working again…it has been broken… You can use this to create a preset in the CLUT module to match a jpg to the raw… it actually works quite well… This could be a nice option also if you are looking to match a jpg look… The manual has decent instructions and there are for sure references on how to use it… I think one in an old blog post on the DT website…

I have tweaked this to work with a spyderchecker 24 and colorchecker 24 and it works fairly well also… I am just not sure over how wide a range you could use it…

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Thanks for the examples. Glad you worked out the embedded jpg preview too!:slightly_smiling_face:
I agree with @priort, using legacy WB (that is, switching off the color calibration module and setting the WB to “as shot”, which can be set as default in the preferences in 4.2) is worthwhile when trying to match the jpgs. It’s more like what the camera does.

I actually have an OM-D EM-5 ii myself - so I had a look at a comparison like you did. (sort of) JPG (which was a square format) on the left, a quick edit with legacy wb and sigmoid on the right. I think I’m seeing the same thing you showed? Definitely less red…

20min later…
I spent quite a while trying to match it with the controls in color calibration - if I was using it for WB I would make a second instance but I wasn’t - and was able to get closer, I think, but it seems like whatever Olympus is doing is more complex than a simple color matrix, which is what the channel mixer is.
I got to this:


which looks closer, but I can’t match the more subtle color differences. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:
I think if used color balance rgb as well I could get closer, but I find it gets less repeatable the more tweaks I do…
If you wanted to see my adjustments, you can import this style in lighttable, then apply it either there or with the button at lower left of the image in darkroom.
Attempt to replicate OM-D EM5ii jpg colors.dtstyle (3.2 KB)
I don’t expect this to solve your problem, but it might give some ideas :wink:
Interesting excercise!

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I’ll have to have a look at that…

Thanks everyone for you help, lots of ideas here! I’ll have another go in the morning (and download those example settings as well) as it’s late here now. What I have discovered is disabling the Colour Balance RGB I had used to increase saturation a little took out most of the yellow cast, but I couldn’t find a way to boost colours without using it, although I’m trying legacy modules next.

I have a feeling any pushing of the Olympus colours produces this effect as playing with the highlight saturation in this module did seem to help a lot - but of course this could be simply a case of reducing all the colours. I did find Vibrance in the Colour Balance RGB module had a better effect, but of course this may be simply be again that it is not pushing the colours so much?

I’ve downloaded the Olympus software and the raw conversions are stunning without any further adjustment, only trouble is it is horrendously slow and awfully clunky! DT is really fast on my old 2014 MacBook Air but crikey, does anyone actually use these modules in depth, and what do they use them for… it’s almost like the software is a PHD project for a postgraduate optical science doctorate! :joy:

I think camera manufacturers’ own software is generally the best option for getting the exact look they meant the camera to give - they made it after all - but they do usually seem to be clunky unfortunately.

I believe that in RawTherapee (more great software btw) it’s recommended to use the Adobe profiles that are packaged with the freely available DNG Converter software. dt can use other profiles, but I’ve never tried it. I might look at it sometime, as I’d imagine it might help with getting a certain look, as Adobe seem to have profiles meant to replicate the camera look.

Hardly anyone uses all of them :sweat_smile: I think. But you only need a pretty reasonable list to do most things. My go-to list in no particular order:

Exposure
Sigmoid (sometimes filmic instead)
Color Balance RGB
Tone EQ
Diffuse and sharpen - usually just the local contrast and sharpen demosaicing presets
White balance
Color calibration - only when needed.
Occasionally, color zones
Crop
Rotate and perspective

denoise profiled
lens correction

The last two are just switch on and forget, and many of the others I only access one or two sliders. But it does take some learning. :wink:

Edit: here’s the page about those profiles - I can’t remember just how this would effect things, so I’m not recommending them, just point of interest. How to get LCP and DCP profiles - RawPedia

Before you try legacy modules, I would try sigmoid (instead of filmic) if you haven’t already. I find it rather good, and it gives a more colorful image without adjusting anything else.