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! 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!!