The Neutral color rendering is subdued, perhaps, but decidedly NOT “flat”. Choose Neutral color or simply toggle color rendering off - both settings will produce identical images / histograms on export. Neutral color produces a tonal adjustment set by PL’s initial pipeline using the in-camera jpeg settings as part of the equation. You can get a darker, flatter starting point by using a camera-specific DCP “linear” profile as I summarized in another post in this forum.
Now try this with files from the D850. 
I expect that we will eventually see additional choices for WG neutral color renderings. As previously discussed, the WG and CL initial pipelines are different and there can be no one to one correspondence between neutral color renderings. Having said that, the WG Neutral color rendering is reasonably close to the CL neutral color, neutral tonality rendering.
WG Neutral color will become, I’m betting, the baseline for those additional color renderings. This would be like what DxO did for the CL working color space.
From the DxO PL6 manual regarding the CL working color space choices: “…you have the choice between four “neutral color” settings, which differ slightly only in the shape of their tone curves (i.e., contrast levels). Of these, the Neutral color, neutral
tonality setting is our baseline for switching from any color rendering
to another.”
Adobe .dcp profiles come as part of the free DNG Converter software that can be downloaded from Adobe: Adobe Digital Negative Converter
You can also get interesting (flat) profiles from this site: Free Trial Download | Negative Lab Pro and you don’t need Lightroom to use the profiles.
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I’ll have to look out some saturated ones because most of my “normal” ones work fine without the flat profile.
Really? I must be missing something because I have the Adobe DNG converter and I can’t find any DCP profiles. Please can you give more details on where these files are hiding?
Thanks
search for *.dcp on your machine, e.g. on drive C
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I’ll comment again on Joanna’s observations (first two images) from a slightly different angle.
In the CL color working space, the Neutral color rendering (formerly neutral color, realistic tonality, gamma 2.2) provides the flattest and darkest rendering of all the generic color renderings. There is currently no counterpart to this rendering in WG.
Testing raw files from four different cameras (optical corrections only) in WG, exported aRGB TIFF images were less flat and brighter than counterpart images rendered from the CL, Neutral color, starting point. This was the case in WG regardless of the generic Neutral color rendering status ( toggled on or off). I conclude that the shadow lifting Joanna is seeing here is due primarily to the different tonal adjustment provided by the initial WG pipeline.
Thanks for your elaborations, @eriepa
What intrigued me about the Generic/Neutral color rendering option was Keith’s comment;
'Tis readily confirmed (tho I hadn’t realised this beforehand). I believe this is the only rendering for which this behaviour is the case … which suggests something unique about its construct (?).
Also of interest is your comment;
That’s interesting to me 'cos it suggests we can influence PL’s rendering via camera settings.
Can you provide some examples, please … Perhaps via factors such as Creative Styles or Picture profiles ? (in Sony vernacular).
John
Can I clarify my findings?
If I simply open an image in WG, without a colour rendering, and then select the default “neutral” rendering, I see no difference. Thus I assume that this “neutral” rendering is the default for the WG pipeline - but it is definitely not the flattest or most neutral rendering. For that, I am obliged to go to the Adobe camera DCP files and choose “Flat” from there.
In other words, “Neutral” doesn’t equate to “no adjustments” and, by inference, turning off the colour rendering tool also applies DxO’s idea of what a neutral rendering should look like.
I am not sufficiently nerdy to want to go into Adobe’s DCP files and find whether the Flat rendering is truly a flat tone curve but I am now more than content that using the Adobe DCP rendering for the Flat “Picture Control” gives me the flattest, most “neutral” rendering, in that, on the whole, I don’t have to keep on reducing contrast and saturation to get rid over- and under-exposure and OOG indicators.
To my mind (which may well be distorted by now) the Flat DCP rendering is what I would have expected when I see Neutral. What DxO are applying is, in fact, their own “special sauce” to give what someone there has decided “looks” neutral. This confirms what you said here…
If you mean that simply by using the WG colour space with no set rendering, that certainly seems to be the case.
If only that were true, it would be the icing on the cake. Unfortunately, as I mentioned, DxO appear to use their own idea of neutral rather than anything extrapolated from the camera. Certainly DxO’s idea of “Neutral” produces many under-exposure indicators than the Adobe “Nikon Standard” DCP.
My guess is, to provide the equivalent rendering to a camera’s Picture Control/Creative Style/etc setting, DxO would have to either analyse every camera’s styles or licence the DCPs from Adobe.
Thanks, found them now, hidden under the ProgramData folder.
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John-M & Joanna - I think (don’t know) that the jpeg “look” is playing some role in the initial pipeline. That may be just the generic jpeg used in DxO’s camera / lens testing, so without data, my talking about “in-camera settings” might just be wishful thinking.
Addendum
Definitely wishful thinking! I took a series of “studio” type photos under identical conditions, varying only the in-camera jpeg settings. On my Leica Q, these were contrast, saturation, and sharpness (low vs high) and sRGB vs Adobe RGB (standard contrast, saturation, and sharpness). This produced different back of the camera and rendered jpeg differences as expected. Sadly, the various DNG raw files taken through PL6 (WG, OC only) and exported as TIFFs produced a series of identical images / histograms. Unrealistic hopes dashed by data!
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Yes, in camera settings are only read by the camera manufacturer’s own raw-converters.
[ One can try different *.dcp profiles, like flat, neutral, landscape, portrait and such, which ‘mirror’ some of those settings. ]
Why I choose to use the Adobe “Flat” DCP rendering for my Nikon D850, from the manual on Picture Controls…
Flat
Details are preserved over a wide tone range, from highlights to shadows. Choose for photographs that will later be extensively processed or retouched
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Joanna, this is had my hopes up - looked like it would fix some frustration I’ve been experiencing - but I can’t find this Wide Gamut setting. Is it a PL6 thing?
I also don’t see any of those DCP profiles you have. If I select DCP or ICC profile in Colour Rendering it pops up my file browser and I have no such files. Where can I get these?
I’ve been using Camera Body and D750.
Look here:
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In my Adobe Dng Converter I can’t find a choose to export as .dcp.
Dcp digital cinema package
Dng digital negative
George
You wouldn’t, Adobe’s DNG converter creates .dng files. To find the .dcp files that come with the converter see my earlier post:
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