Odd colour shifts when exporting DNG (with optical corrections only) from Wide Gamut Colour Working Space

In my workflow I am usually using DxO Photolab only to apply noise reduction and optical corrections, then export a DNG and continue work with a different software. I am using a 14" M1 MacBook Pro running Monterey

After the upgrade to PL6, I noticed that the colours (especially reds/browns) in the exported DNG are often over-saturated, and do not look like they have been displayed in PL.

I narrowed it down that this happens only if I am using the new “Wide Gamut” colour working space, and then export the image using the “Export DNG (Denoise & Optical Corrections only)” action.

Here’s an example that shows the embedded thumbnail of the original RAW, and the result of different combinations of color working space, and export actions:

The full files can be found in this folder on Google Drive

Could this be a bug in the DNG export action, or am I missing anything here related to colour management?

As possible workarounds I can either

  1. switch back to the Classic/Legacy colour workspace (but I have to do that for each image, or is there some default preference that I am missing?)
  2. use the DNG export with all corrections applied (since I don’t usually apply any other corrections anyway).

Still this seems odd and others that are only using PL6 for RAW conversion and denoising might be confused by this as well.

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Welcome to the forum @feffef

Some shift have already been reported. They can happen with DeepPRIME XD on Macs.
Please search for those posts and see if they cover your issue.

Hint: Edit your account preferences and add environmental detail in the Name field. This helps to avoid the usual question: What’s your platform? Win or Mac?

Thanks for the tipp regarding putting camera / platform details into the name, I didn’t think of that.

I haven’t been using any noise reduction in these examples, so it shouldn’t be related to DeepPRIME.

I searched for dng export & colour topics and found these two threads:

This one contains much more details

But even after reading those, I don’t understand if my specific issue is expected behaviour (and I don’t just understand enough about color spaces), or if this is an issue worth reporting.

In the second thread, @Barbara-S explains that " If you export a DNG using PhotoLab and you open that DNG in PhotoLab, you shouldn’t see a difference."

The WideGamut_OpticalCorrectionsOnly.dng file that you see in the screenshot above,also has that saturated reds/browns (which aren’t present in the preview) when its displayed in DxO (after the export). All other exported files look exactly as the preview PL6 shows before exporting.

So far, all my testing has shown that exporting DNG in ‘wide gamut’ will shift the colours and there is unusable.

Even if opening the same DNG in DxO, you’ll see the same colour shift.

My ticket about this - yes, I opened an official ticket - has been silent for almost a month now.

My question still is: ‘is this expected behaviour. If it is, how are we supposed to use those files in other tools?’. And if it isn’t expected behaviour, can the ‘gamut’ option be ignored while exporting DNG, so you don’t leave it on the wrong setting by accident.

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Thank you for confirming that this is a known but unsolved issue. I’ll stick to the workarounds described in my original description for now.