[argyllcms] Re: help with camera profile
- From: Alberto Ferrante <alberto.ferrante@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "argyllcms@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <argyllcms@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 03 Aug 2012 15:14:20 +0200
Stephen,
I am going to be a bit (but not totally) off-topic in my reply, sorry
for that...
> I have abandoned UFraw. It does not have the required tools for highlight
> recovery and tonal adjustments.
I see. I actually prefer to use curves for that and in most of the cases
this works well.
I am also planning to test Photivo extensively, as soon as they include
the newest version of Dcraw (that supports the Canon 5D III).
Though, ufraw is still the raw converter that better suits my way of
working with the photos and it will be a difficult choice to move away
from this tool (with this I am not saying that ufraw is perfect: it isn't!).
> Adobe lightroom and DNG profiles seem to be a satisfactory solution for the
> majority of digital photographers. We like to think we can do better with
> other
> software and by making our own profiles but first ask yourself two questions:
> 1) Are you as clever as the people in Adobe?
> 2) Do you have the resources that Adobe has?
I do not think I can do better than Adobe, but:
* Photoshop and LR do not run Under Linux (they may under Wine, but this
is a different story).
* I do not like the way LR works: I want a tool that just does raw
conversion and it does it as best as possible; I do not like tools that
do everything ;-)
* Conversion quality of LR, especially with Canon cameras, is not the
best possible, from what I have seen around. Dcraw-based raw converters
can do a better job, almost at par with DPP.
* The matrix profile included in dcraw/ufraw is not the best possible as
you also mentioned in a previous post.
* I would have never thought about profiling my cameras if I had good
profiles in ufraw. It all started a couple of years ago when I could not
get satisfactory results in setting up the tool.
I am not saying that LR is crap, just that I do not like it for good
reasons. I have developed, over the last 5 years, a workflow around
ufraw and gimp (and NoiseNinja, when required) that have worked quite
well so far and I am not planning to change it anytime soon (unless
Photivo proves to be better than ufraw for me). Some of my photos have
been showed in exhibitions, even printed big (70x100cm) and nobody ever
suspected I have processed them by using open source software and
self-made camera profiles... I guess this is a good sign;-)
Problems with shadows/highlight in my profiles are mostly inherent to
automatic processing of raw files (there are times when I do not want to
process all my raw files manually). In a manual process I can control
most of the problems (well, except the fluorescent green highlights of
the -al profile :-D), but, of course, I would prefer to have things
right from the beginning. By using the photos of the IT8 target (mainly
the grayscale) I was able to create a curve that imitates quite well
(visually) the Canon in-camera jpgs and this is OK for me in most of the
automatic processing cases as well as a starting point for manual
processing.
> I haven't switched to Adobe (their products are outrageously overpriced) but
> I
> do plan to experiment with DNG profiles, which are supported in Raw Therapee.
> If it works then I'll use it.
RawTherapee is a great tool, I tested it briefly, but I still prefer
more minimalistic tools. Darktable is also quite nice.
Regards,
Alberto
--
Home page: http://www.alari.ch/people/alberto
Photo galleries : http://albertoferrante.name
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