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Author Topic: DCamProf - a new camera profiling tool  (Read 767310 times)

torger

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Re: DCamProf - a new camera profiling tool
« Reply #1380 on: December 16, 2016, 06:15:53 am »

Thanks, you have some good ideas. It's not going to be a raw converter, I've excluded the capability to open all kinds of raw formats as it's a mess to maintain, and if you're a ACR user you need to make a DNG anyways to make sure conversion becomes the same as ACR. If/when ICC support is added I only need to add TIFF support as the ICC workflows go via that format rather than raw directly.

My vision is that it should be a camera profile designer that has good enough capabilities to make truly excellent general-purpose camera profiles -- with subjective tunings as there's no agreement of what the ultimate color is. In other words the goal is to break the monopoly the camera manufacturers and raw converter makers have today on making great general-purpose profiles. I think it's unfortunate that people choose camera based on what profile that comes built-in into the default workflow, but that is the situation when there is no good camera profile design tool available to the public.

To the average user I think it's hard to not be a "single use" program as you say, but that's not too bad I think. Perhaps commercially it would be better for regular use, but if the software does what most need in a few clicks I'm happy. To the advanced user I think it will be a "periodic use" software, that is you don't really use it regularly but at times you put some effort into getting a profile juuust right for your camera and your taste, and perhaps you go back to re-adjust a profile you made before, or use the comparison mode to check out some other profiles.

Profile makers often make up the idea that you should have a colorchecker in each of your scenes and then make scene-specific profiles, which gives you regular use. That may make sense for reproduction photography, but I don't think it makes much sense for general-purpose photography, and I can't really promote a use that I don't believe in, so single use to periodic use it is... :-)

Anders, this looks very promising.

A 1-click profile generator with well-picked defaults would be a very good start.

The technical manual tuning would be nice to have, but to make this more than a single-use tool (once you have built a profile for your camera you never use it again) it would be good to make it something that builds a community around it -- eg, people can contribute look operators -- and that doesn't require a deep understanding of illuminants and gamut compression.

The Adobe DNG editor has some useful features, but you can't see what difference your tweaks make and so the workflow with Lightroom / ACR is cumbersome.  Finding a clever visual way of making comparisons between profiles or individual adjustments is the key to success.  For example, being able to tune the DCampProf Natural or Natural+ profile generated profile (relative to the Adobe Standard, say) would be a good start.  (So being able to pick up the profiles installed in your system without copying them and then using them to tune your own profiles would be a good start.  Put another way, concentrate on easy workflow, rather than raw capability would be good.

My 1/2p.  Happy to offer to B test at an appropriate time.
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scyth

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Re: DCamProf - a new camera profiling tool
« Reply #1381 on: December 16, 2016, 09:30:19 am »

My vision is that it should be a camera profile designer

but one can load existing dcp or icc profile and tune it from there, using whatever picture you one wants to use (to select colors with some color picker and watch the changes how they affect picture - something like C1 color editor that can then save your changes as a new "camera profile"), no ?
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scyth

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Re: DCamProf - a new camera profiling tool
« Reply #1382 on: December 16, 2016, 09:35:38 am »

BasICColor has done the right thing(tm) in terms of design for selling as much as possible -- their software has almost no settings, and that's what the general user wants, something than looks clean and easy and something that just works. While my software will do great profiles with "one click" too, there will still be massive amount of settings and it will look quite technical and that will scare some people away regardless of how simple it will be to make a profile with default settings.

a lot GUI frontends for command line tools that actually do a decent jobs - DisplayCAL is a prime example (or smallish makeinputicc for camera profiles)
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torger

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Re: DCamProf - a new camera profiling tool
« Reply #1383 on: December 16, 2016, 10:49:53 am »

but one can load existing dcp or icc profile and tune it from there, using whatever picture you one wants to use (to select colors with some color picker and watch the changes how they affect picture - something like C1 color editor that can then save your changes as a new "camera profile"), no ?

No, like DCamProf it has no profile import, it can only make and edit its own profiles, which then is *exported* to a DCP.

DCamProf starts with calculating a colorimetric base, and then adds a tone reproduction operator including gamut compression on top, and then one adds look adjustments on top of that. If you import a finished ICC or DCP you just have the end result, you can't split it into those mentioned parts, so it doesn't fit into the profile design workflow.

It wouldn't be too hard though to just make an edit tool just for that specific purpose, but it's not something I plan for the first release and it's not something I would use myself so people would have to nag about it :-). Also, Adobe's DNG Profile Editor already has this for DCPs, and C1 has it for ICCs. If your profile was designed by my software from the start it makes much more sense to edit that project than adjusting the resulting DCP, but if you want to I suppose you can by using Adobe's DNG Profile Editor.

It's not *unthinkable* that I would grow the software into becoming a sort of RawDigger for ICC and DNG profiles, eg analyzing and doing stuff with existing profiles made by others, but the primary focus now is to make a profile design software where you built one from the ground and up.
« Last Edit: December 16, 2016, 11:05:11 am by torger »
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scyth

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Re: DCamProf - a new camera profiling tool
« Reply #1384 on: December 16, 2016, 11:42:48 am »

Also, Adobe's DNG Profile Editor already has this for DCPs, and C1 has it for ICCs.
yes and QPCard software has plugin for example, but... you can do it better !

PS: and not only that - the value of the tool is when the author is available (to get somebody from Adobe or P1 is difficult)
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scyth

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Re: DCamProf - a new camera profiling tool
« Reply #1385 on: December 16, 2016, 11:48:05 am »

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Jack Hogan

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Re: DCamProf - a new camera profiling tool
« Reply #1386 on: December 17, 2016, 03:54:48 pm »

Looking forward to it Torger.  Imho there is a lot of value in

1) eliminating the back and forth to Argyll and its finicky handling of cc24 photos
2) easily help develop and fine tune one's own 'look' in real time.

Jack
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scyth

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Re: DCamProf - a new camera profiling tool
« Reply #1387 on: December 17, 2016, 04:57:09 pm »

eliminating the back and forth to Argyll and its finicky handling of cc24 photos

you can use rawdigger instead

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Tim Lookingbill

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Re: DCamProf - a new camera profiling tool
« Reply #1388 on: December 18, 2016, 02:18:07 am »

Congrats, Anders, on the new front end GUI design. You've got to be the hardest working programmer I've ever seen.

Something I've been wanting to ask is how do edits applied with sliders and curve adjusts in several different Raw converters using your profiles act on the preview?

The profiles do a very good job of making a properly and similarly exposed image based on the CC24 target look correct, needing none or very minor edits, but out in the field at least in my case I have to underexpose to preserve highlights in a lot of high contrast scenes where with some I have to severely move to the left the contrast slider in ACR/LR and/or increase Shadow or Fill slider and apply notch curves with the point curve.

Have you seen any artifacts in the previews as a result from applying extreme edits using your profiles?
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torger

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Re: DCamProf - a new camera profiling tool
« Reply #1389 on: December 18, 2016, 06:11:36 am »

Looking forward to it Torger.  Imho there is a lot of value in

1) eliminating the back and forth to Argyll and its finicky handling of cc24 photos
2) easily help develop and fine tune one's own 'look' in real time.

Jack

Yes this will provide that, although "real-time" is more like semi-realtime. DCamProf's algorithms are really suited for realtime processing, and while optimizing them heavily could make it considerably better it would be a massive amount of work and one would still not reach the speed of say LR sliders. The thing with raw converters is that they in many ways are optimized for speed rather than using the perceptually best possible color spaces, while DCamProf of course is the opposite. I'm very impressed with the speed of LR by the way, it's hard to get a raw software that responsive.

I've done some optimization from the command line tool, but it will still be a bit slow. It will be like ~1 second for refresh on the look adjustments on a decent computer, and for other edits it can be multiple seconds and you manually press a button to render after a change. I've adapted the GUI and workflow to be able to work as efficiently as possible despite having limited realtime capability. For example after you made a change and new render, you can peek on the previous result with a quick A/B swap, to see if you want to revert back and re-adjust. The look adjustments and the curve edit is what can be made with automatic "realtime" update. I think it's ok way to work, and it wouldn't make sense to compromise the algorithms just to get speed, for that you have a raw converter. We'll see what people think about it :-).
« Last Edit: December 18, 2016, 06:15:38 am by torger »
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GWGill

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Re: DCamProf - a new camera profiling tool
« Reply #1390 on: December 18, 2016, 04:47:54 pm »

1) eliminating the back and forth to Argyll and its finicky handling of cc24 photos

Are you just referring to the fact that it's a command line process, or
something else ? (i.e. , what precisely do you find "finicky").

Thanks.
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Jack Hogan

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Re: DCamProf - a new camera profiling tool
« Reply #1391 on: December 19, 2016, 04:19:57 am »

Are you just referring to the fact that it's a command line process, or
something else ? (i.e. , what precisely do you find "finicky").

Hi Graeme, I did not mean to appear to be disparaging your otherwise excellent collection, which in fact I find extremely useful and professional.  Command line does not phase me (in fact I consider it a feature).  My comment refers to my (limited) experience getting scanin to properly find and read the patches in a ColorChecker Passport with the following command:

scanin -v -p -dipn input.tif recogin.cht valin.cie

I am pretty sure I have the correct recogin and valin files.  input.tif is in linear gamma and by choice, my workflow does not include pre-rotation or downsampling.  It is however always taken in landscape orientation and not too far from the correct angle. A typical image is shown below, after final rendering (not linear gamma).  There was no cropping that would make it work.  The only way I was able to get proper results was to open the raw file in RawDigger, get the coordinates of the four corners of the cc24 target and feed them to scanin via the -F switch.



Any suggestions on how to setup scanin to work automatically in such a situation, without downscaling and pre-rotating the tif?

Thanks for your help,
Jack
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torger

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Re: DCamProf - a new camera profiling tool
« Reply #1392 on: December 19, 2016, 06:01:36 am »

A common usage error with Argyll is assuming that the ColorChecker Passport has the same layout as the larger CC24 target. The patches are the same, but the shape of them is slightly different. This means that it becomes hard to match the target if the CC24 layout file is used (ColorChecker.cht), if the image is perfectly straight on it usually works anyway, but otherwise one needs to Passport layout file (ColorCheckerPassport.cht). Note that it requires that you shoot the whole target, that is also the second page.

With a properly matched cht file Argyll is quite good at auto-matching, and using the -p parameter it can correct for some perspective distortion too.

I have myself been guilty of using the ColorChecker.cht file for the colorchecker passport target and thought that Argyll was a bit bad at matching, but once I started using the correct file it became much better.
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GWGill

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Re: DCamProf - a new camera profiling tool
« Reply #1393 on: December 19, 2016, 07:08:35 am »

Hi Jack,
             torger has correctly diagnosed the problem - the ColorChecker recognition layout is not identical to that of the Passport.  I have hacked together a half Passport .cht file that may work better if only the ColorChecker 24 side of the chart has been shot, and it is here.
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Jack Hogan

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Re: DCamProf - a new camera profiling tool
« Reply #1394 on: December 19, 2016, 10:43:15 am »

Hi Anders and Graeme,

I believe that I have been using the correct Passport .cht file.  Things that I thought might be confusing scanin (based on the relative doc page):

1) non-target related detail in the image;
2) the fact that I normally like to take a slightly out of focus image of the target;
3) the target is made up of too many pixels;
4) the image is in linear gamma;

Would using the -G switch help?  I'll try using the half Passport .cht file.  Thanks for your help.

Jack
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GWGill

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Re: DCamProf - a new camera profiling tool
« Reply #1395 on: December 20, 2016, 12:49:33 am »

I believe that I have been using the correct Passport .cht file.
I don't think that's possible, since the full Passport .cht file won't work on half of it
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Jack Hogan

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Re: DCamProf - a new camera profiling tool
« Reply #1396 on: December 21, 2016, 07:12:49 am »

I don't think that's possible, since the full Passport .cht file won't work on half of it

Ah, I did not realize that it expects the full Passport to be visible.  When I have a little time I will try your half-passport.cht.

Jack
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sebbe

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Re: DCamProf - a new camera profiling tool
« Reply #1397 on: January 04, 2017, 09:29:34 am »

I've now come far enough in this project to know that it's not going to be vaporware so I thought I could tell about it, although I can't mention a release date. Hopefully Q1 2017, depending how swamped I'll be with other projects

Great news! Although, I can handle dcamprof, I will buy it. Just to donate your work on dcamprof itself.  :)
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Bip

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Re: DCamProf - a new camera profiling tool
« Reply #1398 on: January 05, 2017, 04:25:57 pm »

Great news! Although, I can handle dcamprof, I will buy it. Just to donate your work on dcamprof itself.  :)
Me too  ;)
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jwlimages

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Re: DCamProf - a new camera profiling tool
« Reply #1399 on: January 05, 2017, 09:32:50 pm »

Quote
Although, I can handle dcamprof, I will buy it.
Well, being 'command-line challenged', I can't handle dcamprof as it is right now, so am eagerly awaiting the opportunity to buy your version with the GUI!  ;D

John
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