Colour spaces - different renderings

Since a picture often says more than a thousand words, I felt I wanted to demonstrate a series of different renderings I have obtained whilst playing around with the new wide gamut.

I have intentionally left the highlight and shadow markers active and, for the first two, started with the “default” generic rendering…

Capture d’écran 2023-02-17 à 13.28.08

As a starting point, here is the Classic colour space…

Now, I changed to the new Wide Gamut…

Notice how the shadows are less blocked in. So, all I have done to recover shadow detail is to change to the Wide Gamut colour space.

To me this is a very important demonstration of the advantage of the Wide Gamut colour space.


Now, I want to compare some of the available colour renderings, whilst still in the Wide Gamut colour space.

First, here is the DxO “default” camera body rendering…

Capture d’écran 2023-02-17 à 13.37.26

Notice how this takes the shadows back to almost the same as the Classic colour space.


Now, Adobe’s camera DCP rendering for the camera’s Standard Picture Setting…

Capture d’écran 2023-02-17 à 13.40.33

And, yes, we are still in Wide Gamut and the shadow markers are still active!

Finally, Adobe’s camera DCP rendering for the camera’s Flat Picture Setting…

Capture d’écran 2023-02-17 à 13.45.47

Now, for me, this is extremely interesting, because I always set my camera to the Flat Picture Setting so the preview on the back of the camera gives the flattest possible rendering.

In addition to the Wide Gamut colour space widening the DR into the shadows, using Adobe’s Flat Picture Setting seems to further enhance the head and foot room I can play with without incurring blocking of shadows or blowing of highlights.


At which point, I count myself as a very happy bunny because, previously, when taking wide dynamic range pictures, I often ended up having to reduce the top of the Tone Curve by a couple of points and increase the bottom by a couple of points, just to kill the out-of-range indicators.

As for OOG warnings, I will start from this new starting point WG/Flat and see what difference it makes to the gamut warnings.


Addenda

Here is all I needed to do, in the way of additional adjustments, to produce a pretty good rendering…

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Be carefully with your conclusions. When the picture contains more saturated colors it’s different.

George

Now for using the Soft Proofing tools on the same image.

  1. for monitor, turn on Soft Proofing, set the profile to sRGB and activate the little monitor button…

We have a winner! Apparently, no adjustments required.

  1. for printer, set the profile to my custom Canon profile, activate Simulate paper & ink and activate the little gamut button…

Two things to notice:

  • There is a light colour change to a more magenta cast and a slightly flatter tonality…
  • The OOG indicators are visible in the deepest shadows.

So, I try to use the Colour Wheel to adjust, what I assume is a colour gamut problem, but which cannot be cured by selecting the area with the pipette, no matter what colour, saturation, luminance or uniformity is selected.

However, going back to the Tone Curve and raising the lower end by about 10 points, does, finally, almost, remove the indicators…

I suppose, for me, the colour gamut indicators were meant to show saturation and not luminance. So I was surprised to find I had to use the Tone Curve instead of the Colour Wheel.

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Two points is enough to get rid of the warnings. That’s the threshold. The same at the other end.

George

I think several things got mixed up. If there are no out of gamut colors in the srgb space, there should be no difference in rendering between any working color spaces greater than srgb.

The difference you see is I believe due to different default renderings applied for the classic rendering and wide gamut rendering. The classic one will use the generic camera style. The wide gamut one will use the neutral style as default.

Can you apply the Adobe flat profile to the classic rendering? It should look identical.

About the magenta color cast in the soft proofed image, that looks more like a bug? There should be no change in colors if no colors are out of gamut.

Joanna

Your first two images compare (I think) CL working color space rendering (neutral color, realistic tonality, gamma 2.2) vs WG (Neutral color). At least in the Win PL6 version, these renderings produce very different tonal curve adjustments. The WG (Neutral color) rendering shifts darker tones markedly to the right on the histogram and I suspect that probably accounts for much of the difference you are presenting.

As I posted in “Color Management in PL6” and elsewhere, the WG (Neutral color) rendering has no exact counterpart in the various CL generic renderings. The closest comparison that I’ve found is between WG (Neutral color) and CL (Neutral color, neutral tonality). That might make a better starting point for your comparison.

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How can you tell if you don’t have the original RAW file?

A threshold is a hardware setting.
When I’m right Nikon uses a threshold of 3 in their camera’s for the blinky’s.

George

I’m not sure what that has to do with using PL - I don’t use the camera blinkies anyway because I was under the impression they were based on JPEG settings.

Blinkies are based on the built-in JPEG preview (or its green channel only) indeed. If you want blinkies based on RAW, you’ll have to go UniWB.

Just an example. Blinky’s are of a fixed value and not image dependent.

George

A curiosity question, Joanna …

I can’t see, from your screen-shot, which Color Rendering you ended up with, in your final version.

Q. Why would you start with a “flat” neutral rendering - - rather than one that you know, from experience, is the one you’ll most likely end up using ? … Is that just a step in your process, perhaps ?

John

Here is my 2c worth of comments:

  1. Most sensors produce a very flat image if no adjustments are made and no profile is applied.
  2. As soon as you apply a profile to the sensor date (Colour Rendering palette settings) you introduce some sort of ‘S’ curve to your data (similar to creating an S curve in the Tone Curve). This is what Gamma adjustments do, they introduce an ‘S’ curve to your image.
  3. In the video world, you will find most serious videographers use some sort of profile that produces a VERY flat video which gives them a high degree of editing latitude to bring out the colour, contrast, DR etc. I believe this is the same as absolutely NO adjustments (something like RAW) which gives them the best starting point for editing.
  4. I think this is similar to what Joanna is seeing with her Flat profile. Joanna, I suggest you research what these different camera profiles are actually doing.

My starting point in Colour Rendering palette is Generic renderings and Neutral color. If I adjust the Intensity slider then NOTHING changes in the image. My images look the best with these settings and I can edit to taste.

One last point Joanna: you do not HAVE to adjust your SP image to remove warnings if you are happy with how the images looks and prints because the printer will actually do that job for you. By trying to remove the warnings you may upset other parts of the image as you have discovered before.

Ahhh - Nothing changes (as I’ve just confirmed !), because the Neutral Color rendering is NOT an s-curve; it truly is “flat” … Is that the correct understanding, Keith ?

I’m still not clear, however, about why one would choose Neutral Color as the default - and then correct from there … when there are other profiles that do a very good job, “out of the box” … saving a lot of steps/work, it seems to me … (Camera body = DxO One being one such example that I really like).

John

It’s about knowing what you eat. While some like canned food, others like to cook from scratch, which corresponds to the flattest possible starting point.

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@John-M I am actually not sure because these settings gives me a great starting point with natural colors and not a flat image as I would expect. I suspect something has been done during the conversation from RAW but nothing drastic.

As the slider makes no difference it means to me that no additional adjustments have been made and I can change my settings for a different look, camera rendering or film simulation.

It just works for me and other people may prefer other settings that work for their gear.

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I used the Adobe provided DCP for the Flat Picture Setting for my Nikon D850, along with the WG colour space.

Do you realise just how many images I have had to adjust the Tone Curve to cure apparently blown highlights and blocked shadows? Finally, after using PL since v1, I get to realise that what DxO call neutral isn’t what I would call neutral. What I have always wanted is, to use an English phrase, “flat as a fart”. It is so much harder to work with an image that has too much contrast or too much saturation but, with this newly discovered combination, I can finally “start from scratch” rather than having to unpick what DxO thought would be “nice to have”.

And I think you have got the idea.

Do you now what? That should be a headline in the help. I think, from now on, I will go back to ignoring the soft proofing that I never knew I needed, since my prints have always come out as I want them anyway. It certainly saves spending hours fiddling and faddling around.

Nailed it!!! Thanks @platypus.

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Wowww!!!

Having discovered WG + Flat rendering, I now reset my lobsters image and apply the WG colour space and the Adobe camera rendering for the D850 Flat Picture Setting.

Then I switch on soft proofing and the monitor warnings for sRGB and I get…

Absolutely no warnings! A colour rendering that I want with absolutely no adjustments apart from the normal optical corrections.

Time for a cup of tea and a chocolate biscuit to celebrate :coffee: :chocolate_bar: :teddy_bear:

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It must be your dcp file which I don’t have, but I still get monitor warnings in the green in the tail of the blue lobster.

George

Just FYI, Joanna;

The result of SP being On or Off, or any changes to the PCD setting therein, are not reflected in Monitor OoG warnings. The result you’ve achieved, I’d hazard a guess, is down to the “flat” DCP Profile you’ve used in Color Rendering … such that nothing needed to be corrected (as indicated by the lack of Monitor OoG warnings).

Sounds like you’re now on to a process you’re happy with - So, stick with it !

John