[argyllcms] Re: Calculate RAW importer profiles ?

  • From: Anders Torger <torger@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: argyllcms@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 31 Jul 2015 21:58:31 +0200

There are not many if any tools out there to design custom looks on
camera profiles, so it's not so easy to realize even if you want to.
The commercial profile makers may have some handles to stretch some
colors, but all I've seen is very limited. For example if you want to
warm up midtones and highlights and leave shadows unchanged (a common
subjective adjustment found in bundled profiles), there's really no
slider for that. Making grays more gray, increasing color separation in
greens, making skintone red and yellow come closer etc, those sort of
adjustments may be hard to do in the profiling software.

With Adobe's DNG PE you can't do lightness-dependet adjustments at
all (the LUT is 2D only). X-Rite profile maker has no tuning
possibilities at all as far as I know, etc.

So what you may need to do is to write custom software with those
tuning possibilities (camera manufacturers have their own inhouse
design software). By coincidence I'm about to add such features to my
DCamProf project (warning: as it's command-line only it will not be
that user-friendly). I can't promise a release date for that feature
set though :-)

It's also worth noting that the type of subjective fine-tunings found
in camera profiles requires a good eye for color. You have no
instrument to rely on, it's just your eyes. Not everyone will be
able to make a good job. It's much easier to see if you like the look
of a profile or not, than saying what components in it that makes you
like it, which you need to understand if you're designing your own
profile.

You probably need to do a lot of trial-and-error and comparing back and
forth for various subjects to work out a well-designed look.

/Anders

On 07/29/2015 08:34:52 PM, Ben Goren wrote:

On Jul 28, 2015, at 10:06 PM, Graeme Gill <graeme@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Ben Goren wrote:

Safest bet? Run it past a lawyer with relevant specialization.

In my view the safest bet is to create your own transform that
you like the look of, from scratch. It's all your own work then,
and you can sleep easier.

Yes!

You also have something you can market as your own, whether it's your
own photographic look you use to differentiate yourself from all the
other photographers or your own set of new and interesting recipes
you
can make available to others. And you're not burdened by trying to
match somebody else's tastes and work.

Much easier technically, safe legally, and you have only yourself to
blame if you don't like the results aesthetically. What's not to
love?

b&





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