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JPG vs RAW Colors


TrickyMrT

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Hi everyone,

 

I still try to figure out how to get the best matching colors.

 

I shoot now in JPG+RAW. When I edit the RAW files the colors looking different to the rendered out of camera JPG´s. Of course, I understand that this is normal.

 

Now I try fiddling out how to adjust the RAW files to get a similar color result.

 

What I do now is

 

Red saturation  - 15

Blue saturation - 5

 

I´m not happy with the results. Maybe someone can share a better saturation level?

 

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Its a bit of a "how long is a piece of string" question in that it all depends: on a whole host of variables. You need to be very specific about what you are trying to achieve and what your viewing system is, how its situated, light levels, and lots more. If you give a run down of roughly what you are using and trying to do it would help.

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Hi everyone,

 

I still try to figure out how to get the best matching colors.

 

I shoot now in JPG+RAW. When I edit the RAW files the colors looking different to the rendered out of camera JPG´s. Of course, I understand that this is normal.

 

Now I try fiddling out how to adjust the RAW files to get a similar color result.

 

What I do now is

 

Red saturation  - 15

Blue saturation - 5

 

I´m not happy with the results. Maybe someone can share a better saturation level?

 

 

Try the new Adobe Color profile instead of Adobe Standard. In my opinion it is a major improvement not only for colors but also for contrast.

 

If You don´t have the newest LR version try this profile:

 

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Why is the JPG your benchmark? The JPG is just an interpretation of colors. Wouldn’t it be better to benchmark against the original object?

The DNG is also an interpretation of colors.

It is also a processed file.

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Have you calibrated your monitor? Have you profiled your camera? Do you have a colour-managed workflow? If "no" to any of these questions, you are chasing shadows.

 

The book to read is "Real World Colour Management" by Fraser, Murphy et al.

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TMT - I don't want to reproduce the whole book jaap mentions, so I'll try to keep this short (well, shorter than a book). "Calibrating" the color from a raw or .dng file has several moving parts that you have to be aware of, to match your raw files to the jpegs, or get them to be "correct" according to any other standard (there is no guarantee that the jpegs are really a good standard).

 

You are starting in the right place by using the "Calibration" or "Profile" sliders - but you do need to understand exactly what you are trying to do with them, or you will end up, as jaap says, chasing shadows.

 

Those individual primary color (red, green, blue) sliders have two parts - Saturation AND Hue - and you will likely need to work with both of those sliders for all three colors in order to get things controlled to your liking.

 

Those sliders are primarily intended to adjust your .DNG output to match a defined standard, not simply to "look good." The standard is the three additive primary color patches (red, green, blue) on a Colorchecker test chart (third row, left-hand columns).

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColorChecker

 

The normal procedure is to buy and photograph such a chart, under pure "white" sunlight (midday or thereabouts). Then open your picture of the chart and get the overall exposure and white balance to be correct (use the test chart's gray patches for these; the fourth darkest gray patch should be at about value 120 for all three primary colors to be the correct neutral gray and brightness. Your "master" saturation slider in the develop pane should be at zero.

 

Then use your software's eyedropper measuring tool to measure the RGB values of the three colors as reproduced in your picture, and THEN use the sliders for both HUE and SATURATION to shift the colors until the values in your picture match "known" values for those three primaries.

 

The "known values" depend on which color space you are planning to work in - Adobe 1998 being the most common color space for photography. In Adobe 1998, hovering your eyedropper over your image of

 

- the GREEN CC patch, should read 101R, 148G, 76B (with some noise jitters of ± 1-3 difference in the values, which is normal)

- the BLUE CC patch, should read 54R, 62G, 149B

- the RED CC patch should read 152R, 48G, 58B

 

It is likely your unprofiled colors will NOT match those standards exactly, so you start using the sliders to adjust the colors in your picture to get as close to the values as possible. The relative values (e.g. in the green patch, red higher than blue) are as important as the absolute values. The HUE slider will control the balance of the secondary colors (e.g. sliding the GREEN HUE slider right will produce a bluer-green, and sliding it left will produce a redder/yellower-green). The SATURATION slider will change the relative values of the main primary (e.g. green in the green patch) as compared to the secondary primaries (red and blue - e.g. increasing green saturation will leave the green value about the same for that patch, but remove BOTH red and blue to make the green a "purer" green).

 

The other primaries can be adjusted the same way - the Blue Hue slider will make the blue patch more purple (more red, less green) or more cyan (more green in the blue, less red).

 

Some gotchas to be aware of:

 

- Even with all the sliders set to "zero" - you are still using a profile. Either the "Embedded M10" or the "Adobe Standard" profile. When you adjust the sliders, your are making per-color adjustments on top of whatever adjustments the Leica or Adobe software engieers already made and built into their profiles, based on how they thought red, green, and blue should be reproduced. Which is fine and normal - just be aware that you are not really "starting from zero."

 

- it is not obviously documented, but changing the saturation or hue of one the three additive primaries (R, G, B ) will also change the saturation of the complementary subtractive primary color. If you decrease Blue saturation -5, then you are also (and unavoidably) reducing Yellow saturation -5. And if you shift the Blue HUE 5 points right (more purple-magenta) you will also shift your Yellows more green (opposite of magenta). Desaturate greens - and you are also desaturating magentas. Same for reds and cyans.

 

- Hue can affect the "perception" of saturation - a yellower/oranger red may "look" more saturated than a cooler magenta/purple red - even if the actual saturation stays the same.

 

- Because all three of the primaries contain small amounts of the other two colors, adjusting one of the colors influences the other two as well. You adjust your green to be correct, and then adjust red and blue to be correct, and you go back and measure green - and it will have shifted a bit. It is a recursive process, that usually takes about 3 passes through all three primary colors to filter out the interactions.

 

So you can see it is not as simple as "the reds are too saturated - I'll just dial down the red saturation." It won't necessarily get you where you want to go, and may take you some place you don't want to go.

 

X-Rite, who currently own the ColorChecker rights, produce their own"automated" software to do those steps for you. Although, again, you are somewhat dependent on choices and assumptions made for you without your knowledge by the X-Rite engineers.

__________________________

 

In theory, after doing all that, you will have a numerically-correct calibration of how your M10 reproduces those known colors (and all the others in between) so that your picture should - numerically - match the original chart. And - again in theory - if your screen is correctly calibrated and profiled, your picture on-screen will match the original ColorChecker if your hold it up beside your monitor; and IF your printer profile is correct, your can make a print of your picture of the ColorChecker and hold that print up beside the original chart, and they will look the same.

 

Will that necessarily match the jpegs, as processed inside the camera in a fraction of a second? That depends - did the camera apply the correct white balance (or at least the same WB you have)? What were the settings in the camera's jpeg menu for Saturation and Contrast? The M10 jpegs will be created in the sRGB color space while your DNG colors will be created in - whatever color space you have chosen as your working space for LR or PhotoShop or whatever program you use. The M10 jpegs will probably use the "Embedded M10" profile - are you?

 

You can, if you want, still jump in and just throw some sliders around. But with luck, you now have a better idea of how the gears are meshing behind the scenes (within the software) and may be producing unintended consquences.

Edited by adan
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I still try to figure out how to get the best matching colors.

 

 

The best colour profile is the one in your head, if the photograph has the look of how you remembered the scene, either factually or emotionally, then it ticks the box.

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Yes, there are some dos and don'ts of "colour management". In my experience though colour management is a damage limitation exercise. Its not so bad if you have a 'closed' system in which you manage colour throughout the workflow and print yourself, though even so its best to follow guidelines such as no dominant colours surrounding the monitor, reasonable lighting, and my personal hobby horse of not having the monitor brightness turned up too high - in my experience the single biggest cause of poor (and often dark) prints. However in the real world where you don't control the full process there is the problem of mis-matched systems. If you don't believe me just search all the 'best' advice on the web and you'll see what I mean. FWIW I think this is an area where common sense is actually very useful.

 

As part of my work I copy large artworks which cannot be scanned. I do use a colur checker chart and I do try to ensure that I get reasonable colour accuracy but given that I'm not going to print or otherwise utilise the files I can only go so far. That said I am at times in the position to check prints against artwork and generally speaking I supply files which produce prints (from good printers) which are close enough to the original to satisfy even the artist. That's what really matters.

 

But to go back to colour management I'd say that its about ensuring good quality hardware, known software, being sensible about placement, lighting, brightness, and checking that hitting an 'auto levels' or 'auto tone' doesn't vastly change things - if it does then there is potentially a significant bias somewhere (its a silly way to do things but its actually surprisingly handy). Lastly, don't be too pedantic. Colour is not perfectly reproducible and most certainly not when you are viewing images on a screen and translating them to paper.

 

To get back to the original question, the camera creates jpegs based on its inbuilt biases. Trying to reproduce these from a RAW file  is a matter of some trial and error and depending on your software, may actually prove very difficult. If you are satisfied with the jpeg then use it as it is, if you aren't then try to edit the RAW file to how you want the image to be is all I can suggest.

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Thank you for all these great replies.

 

The initial question was, that I try to reproduce the JPG colors as good as possible from my RAW files.

 

In my case, it is always the red which seems too much. Because the Adobe M10 profile does not solve this issues i would prefer an alternative way.

 

 

Of course, I know, that there is no "right color" but I´m looking for something which comes nearby the camera internal JPG colors.

 

 

Does anyone have a good basic setting for this?

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Ok, in the interests of science, here is an attempt at some settings to match an M10 DNG file as closely as I can to the JPG from the same image. My basic approach was as above (post #13) for normal camera calibration, except I used the JPG's colors as my "Colorchecker target" values. If the JPG rendered a point in the man's red shirt as 179R, 42G, 20B, I measured and adjusted the same spot in the DNG until it also read the same. Same for many other colors around the image (blue sky, color patches on posters, skin tone, flowers, green grass leaves). The JPG was shot with jpeg controls set to "Standard."

 

M10, ca. 1970 Leitz 50mm Summicron. Exposure comp set to "-.33"

 

JPG original LEFT, DNG RIGHT.

 

YMMV, so I'd recommend shooting your own images of a subject with lots of colors (including bright reds - I got lucky today), and taking some measurements from colors in the JPG, and then playing with the controls to develop your DNG to match.

 

I used PhotoShop, with Adobe's Camera Raw plugin to process the DNG. Here are the settings:

 

Basic/Develop controls -

WB: 4850 with +11 (magenta) tint (JPEG WB was "AWB")

Blacks -9 (darker)

Global Sat. -10

Everything else set to "0"

 

Tone Curve - "Medium Contrast" curve

 

Calibration Settings

Profile "Leica M10" - with these adjustments

 

Shadow Tint -5 (green)

Red Primary - Hue -4, Sat. -6

Green Primary - Hue +13, Sat. +15

Blue Primary - Hue 0 , Sat. -30

 

Tweaks in the HSL/Grayscale controls

 

Hue - Yellows +9

Saturation - Yellows +13, Reds -5

Luminance - Reds -10, yellows +10

 

Are there still small differences? Yep. it is like giving the same bread dough to two different cooks with two different ovens - the finished loaves will never match exactly.

 

If I were doing it over, I might reduce the amount I pushed the reds toward magenta a bit, i.e. a tad yellower - Calibration for Red Primary Hue left at zero to -2 instead of -4.

 

And of course I was not trying to make it "good" - I was trying to make it match the JPG.

 

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Edited by adan
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