Request/Suggestion: Fix to avoid being caught-out if NOT using Soft Proofing (with new Working Color Space)

[Guenterm (Win11, MAC OS, DPL 5, FP, VP, Nik4, Olympus)]

@John-M

Yes - no argument - Except that, this post has absolutely nothing to do with printing.

Hello John,

I have now read through everything again and your last post from point 5 onwards has given me a little more clarity about what the original post was supposed to say. Please excuse me if I have watered down the topic a little.
However, I now understand even less the procedure and the implementation of the functions (incl. softproof ) by DXO.
I will continue to test the trial, but will use my version 5 productively until I feel I have a largely bug-free and logical version 6.
Who can say how many surprises are still hidden.
Thanks again for your patience and no-nonsense approach to clearing up all my confusions.

best regards

Guenter

[Joanna (Joanna Carter)]

@KeithRJ

I saw on one of you many posts that you also use Generic renderings with Neutral color, realistic tonality (gamma 2.2) so I think you may find this to work for you

Thank you Keith. That is essentially where I want to end up most of the time.

Your message prompted me to do a series of tests.

Let’s start by editing the lobsters in PL5.

This is the image, totally untouched, apart from default optical corrections…

I have activated the highlight and shadow warnings but, as the image stands, no warnings are produced.

However, if I apply around 50 to the fine contrast slider, we start to get small blown highlights and even smaller blocked shadows…

In PL5, what I would do to eliminate these warnings is to slightly reduce the top and and raise the bottom levels on the tone curve…

For me, that would be a case of “job done” ready for export or printing.

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Now we come to PL6.

Deleting the DOP file and opening with the same default settings, but with the WG selected, the same image gives…

An overall brighter and slightly more saturated appearance.

This time, even with no fine contrast added, the highlight and shadow warnings are present…

Adding 50 of fine contrast makes them even more noticeable…

However, doing the same tweaks to the end of the tone curve is just as effective as in PL5, completely removing the warnings…

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However, now we have OOG warnings available so, let’s go on to activate them for a screen that has been profiled for sRGB…

Normally, I wouldn’t have bothered but, since PL6 now makes me aware of these, I suppose I had better do something about them.

Getting rid of the warning on the red meant adjusting the luminance on the red spot of the colour wheel…

Getting rid of the warnings for green was slightly more difficult as it required both reducing the saturation and increasing the luminance to get a rendering that was still sufficiently saturated…

What isn’t apparent is the OOG blues, which I had to zoom in to see. The warnings being blue made this particularly difficult. I would rather see something like the grey that Adobe use.

Once again, correcting these involved both saturation and luminance adjustments, which is quite fiddly…

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Finally, I gently dropped the tone curve to give me a deeper overall coloration…

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So, in the end, a rendering that might be deemed “acceptable”, although still not as satisfactory as that obtained in PL5 with very little effort, but with a whole load more effort.

Well, at least, I don’t have to bother with soft proofing for printing. I shall stick to exporting to ProPhoto RGB TIFF files and using the macOS print dialog for that.

[KeithRJ (Keith - Perth, Australia - Win11, PL6, VP3, Canon, DJI)]

@Joanna, what if you ignored OOG warnings and just did an export, is the output the same as with PL5?

I don’t think you should be trying to remove the OOG colours as the export will adjust them to the output colourspace. The OOG warning is there for information purposes and to let you know that some changes will be made to those colours when you export so you may see some differences in the output when compared to the screen.

In PL5 the WCS is smaller than in PL6 so the colours you work with in PL6 may be larger than in PL5 but the export should be the same for the same target profile.

Does that make sense?

[John-M (Melbourne, Australia - Win10)]

Hi Joanna.

I trust you’ve had a chance to work-thru my “simple & succinct” explanation above (?)
– I hope it helped.

Would you please point me at a download for your Lobster example … I’m sure you’ve provided one, but I cannot find it again.

John

[KeithRJ (Keith - Perth, Australia - Win11, PL6, VP3, Canon, DJI)]

@Joanna here is my edit of your lobsters. I reduced the exposure slightly and removed the clipping in the same way as you described above, then exported using sRGB profile. No soft proofing or anything other than the the changes mentioned above and the default lens corrections.

Does this match your expectations?

[KeithRJ (Keith - Perth, Australia - Win11, PL6, VP3, Canon, DJI)]

Now here is something interesting:

I loaded the above jpg into PL6 and it shows Monitor Gamut warnings in the blue areas! My monitor is P3 but this is a sRGB image so why would there be monitor gamut warnings?

Is PL6 exporting the full gamut of the photo but tagging with the sRGB profile so that other colour managed software can display the image after applying their own method of displaying OOG colours for a sRGB image.

So the question now is:

When exporting a large gamut photo to a sRGB colourspace, does PL6 export the full gamut but embed the sRGB profile to tell other software that they should convert the image to sRGB when displaying.

OR

Is the output fully converted to the sRGB colourspace?

I am sure I have seen mentioned elsewhere that even though an image is tagged with an ICC profile, it can be removed and reverted back to the full original colour space and then tagged with a different profile (maybe I am smoking something or does this make sense?)

This is all getting too hard and we really need full clarification form DxO about what is happening each and every step along the way from loading the RAW to exporting with a profile.

[Joanna (Joanna Carter)]

@John-M

I trust you’ve had a chance to work-thru my “simple & succinct” explanation above (?)
– I hope it helped.

Hmmm. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I wanted to avoid explicitly using soft proofing, to see what the effect was.

I did also try with soft proofing, but that seems to make life even more difficult.

I’m also still not sure which gamut warnings to switch on or off below the histogram and for what purpose.

From what I can gather, the right-hand one is meant to be for a “target” gamut and, certainly, on my P3 screen, setting that to sRGB throws up all sorts of warnings that you end up with a horribly desaturated image trying to get rid of them…

It’s still too confusing because there seems to be more than one way of skinning this particular cat. PL5 was so simple and yet got me the results I always anticipated, both for posting images here and for high quality large format printing.

@John-M

Would you please point me at a download for your Lobster example … I’m sure you’ve provided one, but I cannot find it again.

I can’t find it either and am having problems posting anything but JPG files to the forums. I have sent you a DM asking for your email.

@KeithRJ

Does this match your expectations?

Sort of

@KeithRJ

This is all getting too hard and we really need full clarification form DxO about what is happening each and every step along the way from loading the RAW to exporting with a profile.

I couldn’t agree more. Which is why I am only treating PL6 as an ongoing beta product and continuing to do me real work in PL5.

[KeithRJ (Keith - Perth, Australia - Win11, PL6, VP3, Canon, DJI)]

@Joanna

I’m also still not sure which gamut warnings to switch on or off below the histogram and for what purpose.

Only use the Highlights and Shadow warnings. The Monitor warning shows what colours in the file is OOG for your monitor and the SP warning shows which colours are OOG for the SP profile selected and is only available when SP=On.

I find these new warnings are informational only because when you export to the selected profile PL6 will make some changes to move these OOG colours into the selected colour space. This is exactly what PL5 does and you did not know about it because it was all done behind the scenes.

Don’t try and fix these Gamut warnings because PL6 will do a much better job for you by using their special soup recipe that John-M talks about

[Joanna (Joanna Carter)]

@KeithRJ

Don’t try and fix these Gamut warnings because PL6 will do a much better job for you by using their special soup recipe that John-M talks about

Which leads me to ask, why complicate life by providing them?

[KeithRJ (Keith - Perth, Australia - Win11, PL6, VP3, Canon, DJI)]

@Joanna

Which leads me to ask, why complicate life by providing them?

For those who want to use SP and are interested and for keeping up with the competition and because users demand SP and higher gamut workspaces

Now we are stuck trying to make sense of all this because DxO have left us all in the dark - they have not given us ANY information about what they are doing under the covers or how to use these features properly!

[John-M (Melbourne, Australia - Win10)]

@John-M

Would you please point me at a download for your Lobster example

OK - I have a copy of your RAW file - and the affect I describe above is very clearly obvious;

1. I applied DXO’s “No Corrections” preset … and I changed Color Rendering to Generic renderings with Neutral color, realistic tonality (gamma 2.2) … which, I understand, is your preference (Not that the Color Rendering makes any meaningful difference at all to this phenomenon).

2. I have Working Color Space = Wide-Gamut … and SP=OFF
   – here’s what I see (within PL) on my sRGB monitor
   

   
   
   Tip : Click on one image and then use arrows < > to quickly compare SP = OFF versus SP=ON…

3. I export to disk - with target as JPG with export ICC-Profile = sRGB~

4. I view the exported JPG on my sRGB monitor (using Irfan Viewer - not from within PL)

5. I go back to the preview within PL – and compare what I see (within PL) versus what I see via Irfan-Viewer — Oh, dear (Fake surprise) - they look quite different !!

6. I switch Soft Proofing = ON
   – here’s what I now see (within PL) on my sRGB monitor. Note esp. saturated “oranges” on RHS.
   Ah, that’s better - It’s now the SAME as what I see when viewing the exported JPG (via Irfan)
   

   

With SP=OFF - that’s NOT WYSIWYG - as we experienced it with PLv5.

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@KeithRJ

I have been doing a lot of testing and communicating with @John-M in a private thread and believe I have come up with a solution that will work for me as well as {Joanna}.

There are work-arounds, such as the steps that Keith outlines - I’m doing something similar … but, I’m aiming for a solution that “just works” - for all the Average-Joe users out there who will have no inkling about this issue … and will expect PLv6 to exhibit WYSIWYG behaviour in all cases.

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John

[Guenterm (Win11, MAC OS, DPL 5, FP, VP, Nik4, Olympus)]

And what have you all done in the EA Time

Only a joke

[JoJu (Joachim)]

@Guenterm

Only a joke

But an excellent one

@Joanna

Which leads me to ask, why complicate life by providing them?

To make your life more adventurous, I believe.

[KeithRJ (Keith - Perth, Australia - Win11, PL6, VP3, Canon, DJI)]

@John-M

I view the exported JPG on my sRGB monitor (using Irfan Viewer - not from within PL)

@John-M What are your Colour Management settings in IrfanView?

[KeithRJ (Keith - Perth, Australia - Win11, PL6, VP3, Canon, DJI)]

Here are results from my test with SP=Off and the following edits:

I reduced the exposure slightly and removed the clipping in the same way as Joanna described, then exported using sRGB profile. No soft proofing or anything other than the the changes mentioned above and the default lens corrections.

Preview with sRGB jpg on my P3 monitor:

Preview on my near sRGB monitor (slightly larger gamut than sRGB):

I don’t see a huge difference!

[IanS]

Hi John

I have voted as instructed

I have read the thread, but don’t understand completely how DXO have got to this stage of complexity. I use Capture One and in C1 you are always soft proofing because the raw image colours always have to be “fitted in” to something, sRGB, a paper profile etc.In C1 you choose the Proof Profile you want to use, and that’s it.

I include below an explanation of C1’s explanation in the hope an “alternative” expression of soft proofing might help.

Additionally, I would suggest that there is an alternative way, I use in C1, of applying the editing corrections to the file in order to correct for the target display, paper profile etc.that avoids creating a virtual copy.

In C1 I add a soft proof filled layer and name it, and then make the adjustments to contrast, colour etc on this layer. Then you can simply turn off the soft proof layer for normal edits and enable the layer before you print etc. This does assume you can make all your corrections with local edit tools. In C1 there is no difference between the global or local tools as in DXO, eg you have 1 exposure slider that works globally or locally.

Currently a filled layer is created rather clumsily by pushing a Control Line outside the image boundary but I would have thought it relatively simple to implement a “filled layer” option in the layer palette.

fingers crossed your suggestion is adopted

.

[JoJu (Joachim)]

@IanS

I use Capture One and in C1 you are always soft proofing because the raw image colours always have to be “fitted in” to something, sRGB, a paper profile etc.In C1 you choose the Proof Profile you want to use, and that’s it.

No. Simply not always. Softproofing needs to be specifically activated in C1 and it depends on the current recipe of export. You can SoftProofing switch on or off using the icon with goggles.

[Wolfgang ([ Win10, PL+VP+FP, Nik6 (+3) ])]

@John-M

. . .
3. I export to disk - with target as JPG with export ICC-Profile = sRGB~
4. I view the exported JPG on my sRGB monitor (using Irfan Viewer - not from within PL)
5. I go back to the preview within PL – and compare what I see (within PL) versus what I see via Irfan-Viewer — Oh, dear (Fake surprise) - they look quite different !!
6. I switch Soft Proofing = ON
– here’s what I now see (within PL) on my sRGB monitor. Note esp. saturated “oranges” on RHS.
Ah, that’s better - It’s now the SAME as what I see when viewing the exported JPG (via Irfan)
…

Hi John,

why do you want to compare PL’s rendition with IrfanView, when it is easy in PL?

• All you have to do is create a VC, apply softproof → sRGB and export the sRGB output.
  ( highlight the VC and compare instantly with export or masterfile )
  
  

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With SP=OFF - that’s NOT WYSIWYG - as we experienced it with PLv5.

PL5’s max colour space is AdobeRGB, while you don’t see all colours on your sRGB screen.
→ Instead, you may use PL6’s Classic-Legacy mode (plus SP if needed).

With PL6’s (wider) DxO Wide Gamut WCS you have the same problem.
→ Use the new Monitor Gamut warning to highlight the affected area (to no more ‘walk in the dark’).

The new colour engine works differently to stuff all existing colours into a smaller colour space.
→ SP is your only way (for now) to preview an output with WYSIWYG.
→ Any permanent solution would contradict the use of wider colour spaces.

Wolfgang

[John-M (Melbourne, Australia - Win10)]

Hi Keith,

@KeithRJ

What are your Colour Management settings in IrfanView?

Good question - I see what you’re thinking … Same as yours, tho.

All presentations I’m doing are on my sRGB monitor - with ICC = Current monitor profile.

I even tried it explicitly with ICC Profile for my specific monitor … It made no difference (not that I expected it to … but I checked for that anyway)

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@IanS

I have voted as instructed

… Thanks for sticking with this, Ian - and making the effort to understand my tortured explanation !

@IanS

in C1 you are always soft proofing because the raw image colours always have to be “fitted in” to something, sRGB, a paper profile etc.

I suspect that was DxO’s intention/assumption too - with expectation that we’d understand that SP was necessary (even when simply exporting to our own monitors) … the problem with that is it’s quite different from previous PL versions … where we’ve all simply expected WYSIWYG.

@IanS

In C1 I add a soft proof filled layer and name it, and then make the adjustments to contrast, colour etc on this layer. Then you can simply turn off the soft proof layer for normal edits and enable the layer before you print etc. This does assume you can make all your corrections with local edit tools

I understand that’s pretty much what DxO were expecting us to do in PLv6 too (via a Virtual Copy) - with the final step before Export(ing) to Disk being Soft Proofing … that’s why, when we set SP=ON, that window pops-up to recommend we create a VC. Again, the problem is that we’re not used to having to go thru that extra step … we’ve all simply expected WYSIWYG.

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John

[IanS]

You are always colour soft proofing in C1. The Soft Proof icon in the top menu bar activates a “hard” proof where the display represents the full conditions specified in the export recipe, sharpening, image size, etc.
Under view/set Soft Proof Profile and select a “grey” profile and see what is displayed without the soft proof icon activated.