Achieving good color in raw conversion, what is your view?

[Tim Lookingbill]

Faced with this situation I would have tried to lighten the dark areas in PS by creating a luminosity mask and inverting it on a layer and change the blend mode to screen and adjusting the opacity to suit. A good starting point for a little dodging and burning if needed. I don't think your image is easily sorted in LR or ACR . PS is the way to go?

You made that sound more complicated and time consuming than doing it in ACR.

Oh wait a minute, I see what you're getting at. Thanks for bringing me back to reality. I'll stop complaining.

[stamper]

If the light and dark areas are well defined - it looks like they are in your image - then it wouldn't take long and if the image really means something to you then go for it. I find you need to be in the mood to undertake such processing and if you try to rush it you get frustrated. In another other thread someone talked about editing hundreds of images, one after another. Must have terrific patience?

[Ellis Vener]

got the impression that both Michael Reichmann and Jeff Schewe feel that a good raw converter like the one in LR 4.2 and ACR can be tweaked to give a satisfactory color whatever the need.

My reasoning may be that it may be better to spend some time tweaking a single raw converter to your taste than live with several ones.

For me, a reasonable approach would be to "zero out" the camera/raw processing pipeline by creating a DNG profile using the DNG Profile Editor from Adobe or Xrite's Color Checker Passport.

DNG Profiles can be tweaked in DNG Profile Editor. In my humble opinion the smartest approach would be to just create some preset for different kind of color rendition.

I agree wholeheartedly about workign with a single raw convertor.

Lately I  have also been working with keeping the camera calibration set to Adobe's  default profile for a camera and then using a H/S/L preset created using the Datacolor SpyderCHECKR system as well. I'm not saying it is better (or worse) than using either the DNG profile Editor or the Xrite ColorChecker Passport created profile, but it gives me another wrench in my digital darkroom toolbox. 

[Gulag]

Great color can always be obtained in Photoshop.

take a good look at Schmidt's work:  http://www.christianschmidt.com/#/News/Page_1

[Rhossydd]

Great color can always be obtained in Photoshop.

Can't argue with that, but...

take a good look at Schmidt's work:  http://www.christianschmidt.com/#/News/Page_1

Good colour ?? most looks like it's been through a cheap phone app

[hjulenissen]

I would like to _be able to_ recreate a scene as accurately as possible - i.e. if I had the possibility to inspect the print or my display "side-by-side" with the original scene at the time of capture, I want them to appear subjectively identical.

I might not choose to use that option for all images, but that should be my conscious choice, not some default camera/raw-developer behaviour.

My setup:
*calibrated wide-gamut display (Dell 2711),
*Canon 9000 mk2 printer with paper-supplier profiles
*Canon 7D
*Colorchecker passport
*Adobe Lightroom/Windows 7

I was very dissatisfied with the default Lightroom profiles for my 7D after I got the wide gamut display: saturated reds appeared over-saturated and/or with the wrong hue. My own colorchecker profiles result in a lot more neutral look to me.

I have tried profiling in daylight, incandescent light, direct flash, flash pointed towards my white ceiling, and have concluded that a single profile seems to be sufficient for most of my needs.

Some random thoughts:
1. A given camera might not be able to differentiate between two colors that we humans are able to differentiate, due to differences in color filtering. Should a camera profile render as "color A" or "color B" then?
2a. The CIE observer response is based on measurements on a set of test people. There may be "noise" in that measurement, and any single user may have a response that is more or less different (I hear that some women have 4 primary colors - explains a lot to me)
2b. The CIE measurements are based on some idealized conditions (e.g. size of patches). In different conditions, the response may be different.
3. Color profiling is probably not only about "mapping each measurement to the closest available color". If you "sample" color by 16 patches, most codes will be some interpolated correction. So should you fit some parametric model? What happens if you allow for this model to have more free variables than warranted by the measurements? Perhaps banding? Perhaps visible clipping?

-h

http://wwwimages.adobe.com/www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/products/photoshop/pdfs/cs6/DNGProfile_EditorDocumentation.pdf

[Gulag]

Can't argue with that, but...Good colour ?? most looks like it's been through a cheap phone app

If that's what the commercial world wants, that's what the commercial world gets.  After all, photogs are the whores (or sluts) of the industries.

[Fine_Art]

Is a color checker good enough? I remember seeing camera color mapped on a gamut chart at some review website. The variances official color to camera color were usually small vectors pointing in different directions. In other words moving R,G,B curves to match a point would not fix other points. The camera has to be as good as possible from the start.

For those that have corrected with a color checker how's about a test? Take a picture of an IT8 target that came with your scanner from film days. Print it. Take a picture of the IT8 beside the printout. Post it here. For those that aren't familiar with an IT8 it is like a color checker with many more shades.

[stefohl]

Or a camera is still behind in colors compared to film.

Best regards,
Anders

We do a lot of prints reproducing art work. Most of the time the original art is digitally photographed, but sometimes we get a 4x5 tranny to scan. We have a very accurate scanner profile for our Imacon scanner, made with the Hutchcolor target, and the scans look very much like the transparency. But when we compare the original art work with the print we've made, there is a huge difference in some colours. Not in all colours, but in some. It is soooo much easier to get a good repro print when the art work was reproduced with a good digital camera.

So I can't agree with you that digital cameras is behind film. If you're talking about accurate colours, I find digital cameras far superior.

[Tim Lookingbill]

...But when we compare the original art work with the print we've made, there is a huge difference in some colours. Not in all colours, but in some. It is soooo much easier to get a good repro print when the art work was reproduced with a good digital camera.

So I can't agree with you that digital cameras is behind film. If you're talking about accurate colours, I find digital cameras far superior.

I agree with you.

I don't believe film is completely reliable in accurately recording all possible spectral reflectance characteristics reflected back under artificial or direct sunlight even with the most robust of calibration/profiling packages and especially for recording paints, dyes and pigments for reproduction. Even my consumer level Pentax K100D DSLR records a wider range of color more accurately or at least requiring the least amount of editing with or without a DNG camera profile.

This thread...

http://photo.net/digital-darkroom-forum/00ayu3

...is typical of the level of editing performed on a simple outdoor portrait shot on Velvia just to get the skin correct. The distortion to the color tables that had to be fixed in ACR's HSL panel along with wacky WB settings just shows how off the charts film can go recording what reflected light does to natural objects.

I never have to do that much work shooting any subject let alone artwork with my DSLR. And I get better results shooting under a wider range of light.

[Fine_Art]

Velvia was never designed for skin tones, it was for dramatic landscapes with lush color.

Otherwise I agree that current DSLRs have more faithful color reproduction than most films.

[digitaldog]

In his Kelby Training title There Are No Bad Originals,  Dan Margulis demonstrates that just using default values in ACR and doing the rest editing in Photoshop can ALWAYS produce much better results.

Hog wash! A great workflow for those that charge by the hour however. Dan is great to listen to or maybe read if you have a rendered image that needs serious work IN Photoshop. He can polish an awful turd of an image like few others. Create ugly images in LR/ACR then tune the turd in Photoshop? Seriously?

Dan used to tell folks to set all ACR settings to zero values (talk about an ugly image). Has he actually changed his tune to set em to default?

[deejjjaaaa]

Create ugly images in LR/ACR then tune the turd in Photoshop? Seriously?

not ugly, but unpostprocessed...

[Gulag]

Hog wash! A great workflow for those that charge by the hour however. Dan is great to listen to or maybe read if you have a rendered image that needs serious work IN Photoshop. He can polish an awful turd of an image like few others. Create ugly images in LR/ACR then tune the turd in Photoshop? Seriously?

Dan used to tell folks to set all ACR settings to zero values (talk about an ugly image). Has he actually changed his tune to set em to default?

It really depends on whether or not you're a professional retoucher. From I read, many best photographers always hire the best professional retouchers that they can afford, for example, Annie Leibovitz has been using Pascal Dangin's Box Studios for past twenty plus years.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_collins

[digitaldog]

not ugly, but unpostprocessed...

Why?

I can't find a date for this video. Zero siders in ACR now and in previous versions (PV 2012 or 2010/2003) is significant. The recommendation I have from this source is, set all settings to zero (this is PV2003 days). Pretty fugly looking.

The sliders and various controls that produce really flexible parametric edits non destructively are best set at zero instead of a preferred rendering for what reason?

[deejjjaaaa]

Why?

I can't find a date for this video. Zero siders in ACR now and in previous versions (PV 2012 or 2010/2003) is significant.

I bet that was said before "process 2012"... but even now nothing can prevent you from selecting "process 2010" if you want (consider it as a part of zeroing sliders)... but I say that in Margulis' approach you actually do not need ACR/LR at all (except may be to use ACR as a part of post-processing for blown highlights if such need exists).

The recommendation I have from this source is, set all settings to zero (this is PV2003 days). Pretty fugly looking.

but that is not the end of the work in this approach, so why shall you expect an intermediate result to be nice ?

The sliders and various controls that produce really flexible parametric edits non destructively are best set at zero instead of a preferred rendering for what reason?

because apparently "sliders and various controls that produce really flexible parametric edits non destructively" (and what those adjectives, that every raw converter has and had even before ACR or LR appeared, a-la "16 bit MFDB raw files", have to do with the quality /do not mix with usability/ of the final result that he wants and is talking about) are just an obstacle for his workflow in PS, that's it - unless you better know how to get the results in his own workflow, which I doubt... he does his rendering in PS and does not need that to be tainted by any post-processing in ACR/LR... it is just what he does.

[digitaldog]

he does his rendering in PS and does not need that to be tainted by any post-processing in ACR/LR... it is just what he does.

Tainted?

If all you know (how to use) is a hammer everything looks like a nail.

[digitaldog]

standard raw format does not guarantee a good profile there embedded, does it ?

It can't and shouldn't. Every converter would require a different profile so how could you embed such a thing.

Embedding the spectral reading at the scene (illuminant), that might be darn useful. Currently expensive.

[Schewe]

...because apparently "sliders and various controls that produce really flexible parametric edits non destructively" (and what those adjectives, that every raw converter has and had even before ACR or LR appeared, a-la "16 bit MFDB raw files", have to do with the quality /do not mix with usability/ of the final result that he wants and is talking about) are just an obstacle for his workflow in PS, that's it - unless you better know how to get the results in his own workflow, which I doubt... he does his rendering in PS and does not need that to be tainted by any post-processing in ACR/LR... it is just what he does.

When you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail to you...

Dan is a Photoshop expert...he's very, very good at Photoshop, but he's not a photographer (by any stretch). So, since he's a Photoshop expert, everything he does is done in Photoshop...that's what his career is based on.

That worked ok back in the old days where you shot a ton of film but scanned only a few chromes for imaging. That way is not very practical now that shooters shoot digital because you end up with a ton of digital files you must deal with...do selection edits and find an efficient method of processing the images.

If you do a shoot and the client wants the best hero images, you may have many images to process...do you ignore the workflow of optimizing the images in raw (ACR or LR) and hand process each image in Photoshop from scratch from a flat non-optimized raw image? That is a primitive and time consuming workflow...

A more efficient workflow is to do 80-90+% of the heavy lifting in ACR/LR and only do that small amount of work needed in Photoshop.

But that's not what Dan sees...he sees Photoshop being relegated to a much less important role...and thus his role (and value) reduced...

Actually, he's anti ACR/LR primarily because Thomas Knoll refused Dan's request to have the curve control have a luminance only mode without impacting color. If Thomas had said yes, then I suspect Dan would not consider ACR/LR to provide non-professional tools...which is why he hammers on doing nothing in ACR/LR and do the work in Photoshop...because Dan is a hammer :~)

[deejjjaaaa]

Actually, he's anti ACR/LR primarily because Thomas Knoll refused Dan's request to have the curve control have a luminance only mode without impacting color. If Thomas had said yes, then I suspect Dan would not consider ACR/LR to provide non-professional tools...

Schewe, you absolutely need to include a chapter in your book w/ such lore... seriously !