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MikeMike

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« on: November 14, 2007, 08:46:59 pm »

Whenever i go to preview a fresh Raw i see the shot as is from camera, for about a fraction of a second, then Lightroom applies its own settings, which sometimes is great, but for the most part doesn't do a good job at all. For me at least. I have looked in the help but couldn't find anything. I want for lightroom to not apply any of its auto settings at all. Is this even possible?

Thanks!
Michael
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tomrock

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« Reply #1 on: November 15, 2007, 07:12:52 am »

What you're seeing for that split second is the jpeg embedded in the raw file which has the cameras default processing applied.
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larsrc

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« Reply #2 on: November 15, 2007, 08:14:54 am »

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What you're seeing for that split second is the jpeg embedded in the raw file which has the cameras default processing applied.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=153019\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

And sometimes that's actually a really good starting point.  I wish LR or other converters could be set to find settings that give something similar to what the camera gave out.  Of course, reverse engineering the cameras processes would be foolish, but taking some selected areas (lights, darks, colors, grays) to determine a rough approximation of the overall exposure and tone curve *in LR's terms* would be nice.  I sometimes feel rather foolish having to fiddle in LR for a while to get to what the camera figured out and stored in the jpg.  And no, shooting RAW+JPG is not the solution, since I want to be able to tweak further when the default settings are close but not perfect.

In practical terms, the gain in usability is probably not worth the work it'd take to figure it out, given that that work could be spent on other more-desired features like better lens corrections or multi-image handling for HDR/stitching.

-Lars
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Nat Coalson

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« Reply #3 on: November 15, 2007, 10:44:10 am »

For my work, my shooting style and my personal preferences, I've made a set of defaults that I really like. So when I see my LR setting take effect, it's an improvement, not a step back.

First, if you use the "Zero'd" preset as your default settings you can review your images with no adjustment. Then, after you process several files from that starting point, you will get an idea of what your personal preferences are, and you will find you generally make the same kinds of adjustments and use similar values for the settings. You can then set the defaults to your liking.

Also, if you haven't generated your own settings for Camera Calibration using the (X-Rite Color Checker and the ACR Calibrator script), you should.... simply using the right settings in that panel will give you a much better starting point for all your captures.
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digitaldog

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« Reply #4 on: November 15, 2007, 11:46:17 am »

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And sometimes that's actually a really good starting point.  I wish LR or other converters could be set to find settings that give something similar to what the camera gave out. 
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=153031\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Well talk to the camera manufacturers. The JPEG they build is proprietary. They could hand off this info the a Raw converter to produce a default, starting point. Since they don't, the converters have to roll their own (and at a much larger size than this tiny embedded JPEG).
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MikeMike

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« Reply #5 on: November 15, 2007, 01:34:42 pm »

Thank all,

The thing is though is that I can't find a specific setting for all my photos so I don't want make a preset. But even after I see the embedded JPG as you guys say before the raw is processed I could never get it back to the way i saw it with any of the sliders. Any ideas?

Here's a screenshot of my preset menu in the preference.

[attachment=3869:attachment]

Thanks a lot!

Michael
« Last Edit: November 15, 2007, 01:35:39 pm by MikeMike »
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larsrc

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« Reply #6 on: November 15, 2007, 01:52:54 pm »

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Well talk to the camera manufacturers. The JPEG they build is proprietary. They could hand off this info the a Raw converter to produce a default, starting point. Since they don't, the converters have to roll their own (and at a much larger size than this tiny embedded JPEG).
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=153090\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Andrew and John, you misunderstand me.  Instead of trying to keep track of a gazillion camera models and corresponding firmware, a raw conversion program could take the JPG itself as the data to work from.  By seeing what various parts of an image have been turned into in the JPG, the converter can make an educated guess at what settings would produce that conversion -- without having to know anything about the camera or firmware or settings.  It's like color profiling, except instead of making an ICC profile from a known original and a measured target, the converter makes its own settings profile from a known original (the raw file) and a measured target (the jpg).

-Lars
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digitaldog

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« Reply #7 on: November 15, 2007, 01:57:56 pm »

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Andrew and John, you misunderstand me.  Instead of trying to keep track of a gazillion camera models and corresponding firmware, a raw conversion program could take the JPG itself as the data to work from.  By seeing what various parts of an image have been turned into in the JPG, the converter can make an educated guess at what settings would produce that conversion
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=153123\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

How? You've got scene referred data (Raw) and some baked process (JPEG) built from that Raw data and no info on how it was done. How is the converter supposed to 'see' the JPEG and do anything? Either the Raw converter programer would have to attempt to build some kind of rendering model from the proprietary conversion or you do (the end user) by fiddling around and making one (or probably dozens) of presets. It sounds easy (look at the JPEG and make the Raw match) but it ain't. One could suggest you the end user, using your eyes and the various sliders could do the same thing and save a preset. Try it. Its not easy.
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larsrc

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« Reply #8 on: November 15, 2007, 02:33:37 pm »

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How? You've got scene referred data (Raw) and some baked process (JPEG) built from that Raw data and no info on how it was done. How is the converter supposed to 'see' the JPEG and do anything? Either the Raw converter programer would have to attempt to build some kind of rendering model from the proprietary conversion or you do (the end user) by fiddling around and making one (or probably dozens) of presets. It sounds easy (look at the JPEG and make the Raw match) but it ain't. One could suggest you the end user, using your eyes and the various sliders could do the same thing and save a preset. Try it. Its not easy.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=153128\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Obviously, it'd have to be automatic to be useful.  But it's obviously easy to map locations between the RAW and the JPG, since no cropping is involved.  So if you can find some fairly simple areas (patches with roughly the same RAW values), you can look at the equivalent areas in the JPEG and see what they have been transformed into.  What you need to find now is not how it was done, but how it can be done with the settings that the raw converter has.  Obviously, you have to have some idea of what the camera *could* have done (e.g. if it did red-eye reduction, you're SOL), but there will be some white balance setting and some tone curve applied, that's for sure.  I think the tricky part would be that LR for instance has multiple ways of effecting the same change (exposure, lightness, curves etc).  If the converter doesn't have to get it exactly spot-on, but just close enough that it's easy for the user to go from there, it's not as complex.  And indeed, since it's likely that the camera conversion comes pretty close, but unlikely that it's out-and-out perfect, you only need to come close.

It's not that different from what happens in a profiler program when it sees what the output looks like for given input.  Instead of the process being a combination of paper type and ink type and dithering etc, it's a combination of white balance and brightness/contrast settings and basic tone curve etc.

I'm saying it could be done, but at the same time not that it should:)  Though given how some people fuzz over the tone curves of Nikon vs. Canon, maybe being able to reverse engineer them could ease the debate a bit:)

-Lars
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digitaldog

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« Reply #9 on: November 15, 2007, 02:53:17 pm »

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But it's obviously easy to map locations between the RAW and the JPG, since no cropping is involved.

I don't know how you can say its easy.

Raw is Grayscale data. There's a recipe (a million) for converting that from scene referred non demosiced data into, demosiced color. The conversions in-camera are all done using very sophisticated and proprietary algorithms which are not handed off to a Raw converter (well it might be handed off to the manufacture’s converter but no one else). So you're assuming that:

A. Someone is shooting both Raw+JPEG (otherwise, there's nothing the Raw converter can look at, the embedded preview may or may not have all the processing).
B. The converter can somehow produce the same rendering scene for scene.

It probably is possible for Adobe to make a default rendering that's closer to an in-camera JPEG for some but probably not all scenes. Or you can do this yourself as I've suggested you try (and see just how simple it really is).


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What you need to find now is not how it was done, but how it can be done with the settings that the raw converter has.

And here's the rub. The processing used in-camera isn't something being defined for the 3rd party Raw converter.

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It's not that different from what happens in a profiler program when it sees what the output looks like for given input.

Its totally different. When you profile, you send known RGB values to the device and measure them with an instrument, ideally a Spectrophotometer. With the camera, you're capturing Grayscale data and you've got nothing to measure the rendering from.

Even if you shot say a Macbeth target, got the JPEG and measured it, you might do a decent job of matching that with the Raw converter but move into a different illuminant and all bets are off. This is why digital camera profiling generally sucks. You can't treat a digital camera, no less one that captures Raw data like a scanner that captures RGB data using the same illuminate, dynamic range etc.  

And in the end, the reason we shoot Raw is do produce a color rendering we desire, not necessarily one that matches what the camera manufacturer thinks we desire.
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larsrc

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« Reply #10 on: November 15, 2007, 03:28:27 pm »

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But it's obviously easy to map locations between the RAW and the JPG, since no cropping is involved.
I don't know how you can say its easy.
I'm saying that mapping locations is easy.  Given a pixel in the JPG preview (and I'm only talking the preview here), you can by simple arithmetic find where in the RAW the original data that were used to make that pixel are.
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Raw is Grayscale data. There's a recipe (a million) for converting that from scene referred non demosiced data into, demosiced color. The conversions in-camera are all done using very sophisticated and proprietary algorithms which are not handed off to a Raw converter (well it might be handed off to the manufacture’s converter but no one else).
I know that, and I'm not trying to reconstruct the algorithm, but merely an approximation of the result of the algorithm -- which we can see in the preview (and which was what the original poster saw in LR).
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So you're assuming that:

A. Someone is shooting both Raw+JPEG (otherwise, there's nothing the Raw converter can look at, the embedded preview may or may not have all the processing).
B. The converter can somehow produce the same rendering scene for scene.

It probably is possible for Adobe to make a default rendering that's closer to an in-camera JPEG for some but probably not all scenes. Or you can do this yourself as I've suggested you try (and see just how simple it really is).
No, and no.  I'm not saying we can make a one-profile-fits-all profile.  I'm saying that given a specific camera-generated thumbnail JPG, the raw file for the same image, and the set of operations that our raw converter has, it should be possible to get close.  To the thumbnail processing.  For that image.  The operation would have to be repeated for each image, since the camera may have done something different in the next image.

This is at the moment a pure gedankenexperiment.  Back when I used UFRaw for my RAW conversions, a program doing this for me would have been a god-send, as UFRaw has awful defaults.  With LR, I rarely have problems.  Hmmm... UFRaw can take a specific white balance and base curve.  Maybe I should take a shot at doing this.  Guessing the white balance would be a good test.

Note that I'm not talking about finding one gold standard default rendering that matches the camera, but setting the initial settings based on what's seen in the thumbnail.  I realize making a single default to match what the camera does for all images is close to impossible, by machine or by hand.
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Its totally different. When you profile, you send known RGB values to the device and measure them with an instrument, ideally a Spectrophotometer. With the camera, you're capturing Grayscale data and you've got nothing to measure the rendering from.

Even if you shot say a Macbeth target, got the JPEG and measured it, you might do a decent job of matching that with the Raw converter but move into a different illuminant and all bets are off. This is why digital camera profiling generally sucks. You can't treat a digital camera, no less one that captures Raw data like a scanner that captures RGB data using the same illuminate, dynamic range etc. 
Which is why I said one of the first steps should be to figure out the white balance applied -- which should be doable by finding some greytone areas in the JPG and seeing what raw sensor data they were created from.
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And in the end, the reason we shoot Raw is do produce a color rendering we desire, not necessarily one that matches what the camera manufacturer thinks we desire.
I realize that, and I do that myself.  But given varying images, any given preset will *in some cases* be a worse starting point than what the camera did.  It can be mighty frustrating to see that the camera figured out something close to what you wanted in a split-second but you have to spend minutes getting close.  As a computer scientist, I am morally opposed to throwing away precalculated data only to try to recreate it by hand:)

-Lars
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Schewe

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« Reply #11 on: November 15, 2007, 04:23:06 pm »

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As a computer scientist...
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=153148\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


So, as a computer scientist, what part of un-rendered don't you understand? A raw file is un-rendered...a JPEG is rendered and rendered by a processor that is undocumented and proprietary which other 3rd party processors can't use unless they use the camera company's SDK, which Adobe can't use because the SDK doesn't give access to the un-rendered data only the pre-processed data. So, a 3rd party processor is _NEVER_ going to match the camera JPEG. Not only do the 3rd party processors not have access to the camera processing, they don't even use the same processing parameters.

Now, do you get it? The camera JPEG is only once possible rendering of a raw file and no other processor is likely to look exactly like it. Which means, regardless of what the JPEG looks like, it's up to YOU to determine what YOUR rendered raw looks like.
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