Software and Color Rendering For Q2

[tivoli]

Advertisement (gone after registration)

I searched and could not find similar topics. I use both Capture One and DxO and shoot RAW only. Each program supposedly uses the Q2 to render its lens and colors properly but they look different. What is the consensus on which program(s) and/or settings bring out the best and most natural colors in the Q2? Thank you!

[jaapv]

None (or all) - the colours are determined by the settings chosen on every program - hence by the user, not by the software.

What  you will need is a  colour-managed workflow. Which means that you should calibrate your camera by creating a profile for the raw developer to use, and maintain the calibration throughout the processing until the final print, if you want exact colours, for instance for professional product photography.  It is also helpful for predictable results in creative photography.
This is the book that can guide you on your learning curve:

Real World Color Management: Industrial-Strength Production Techniques 2nd Edition

The most important step to take is to buy a good quality Adobe RGB display designed for photo editing. Eizo CG or CS, NEC Spectraview or BenQ Photovue are good choices (note that I do not mention Apple) and CALIBRATE IT REGULARLY.
And then hone your editing skills, whatever program you are using. 

[Advertisement]

The Leica Q3 is available for pre-order at B&H Photo Video and Adorama

[tivoli]

Thank you for that. I do not do prints. I use the images for a variety of uses but also for a large digital frame in my home, the Canvia frame. I noticed in DxO software, it renders color according to the Leica Q2 and there is a slider that says Color Intensity (of the Leica render). It's not the Saturation slider but acts similarly. I had it part way up but the colors seem to intense and so I may not increase the intensity there. But, in general I was wondering how others found the color rendering in Capture One and in DxO and if there is consensus on settings.

[hdmesa]

On 10/12/2021 at 6:22 PM, jaapv said:

None (or all) - the colours are determined by the settings chosen on every program - hence by the user, not by the software.

What  you will need is a  colour-managed workflow. Which means that you should calibrate your camera by creating a profile for the raw developer to use, and maintain the calibration throughout the processing until the final print, if you want exact colours, for instance for professional product photography.  It is also helpful for predictable results in creative photography.
This is the book that can guide you on your learning curve:

Real World Color Management: Industrial-Strength Production Techniques 2nd Edition

The most important step to take is to buy a good quality Adobe RGB display designed for photo editing. Eizo CG or CS, NEC Spectraview or BenQ Photovue are good choices (note that I do not mention Apple) and CALIBRATE IT REGULARLY.
And then hone your editing skills, whatever program you are using. 

Chasing color calibration is best left to printing professionals and may drive some people mad chasing perfect calibration. Most people will be fine without that if using a recent Mac and/or display that renders nearly full Display P3. Adobe RGB was ok for 1998, but no web browser or social media app will render Adobe RGB. Display P3 will show you exactly what users on current mobile devices will see since Instagram app, Facebook app, and all current web browsers honor and render Display P3 profiles. Display P3 is about as wide a profile as Adobe RGB but is a different chunk of the visible spectrum.

And if someone does not want to have a color-calibrated workflow: Capture One renders Q2 files taken in vivid sunrise/sunset light weirdly (incorrectly in my opinion), and that's not the user's fault nor responsibility to fix. The C1 team needs to provide a better Q2 profile. Lightroom provides a much more correct rendering of color with Q2 files taken at sunrise/sunset.

YMMV as they say.

https://creativepro.com/how-do-p3-displays-affect-your-workflow/

https://www.benq.com/en-us/knowledge-center/knowledge/display-p3-monitor-for-creative-work.html

Edited October 15, 2021 by hdmesa

[hdmesa]

On 10/12/2021 at 6:04 PM, tivoli said:

I searched and could not find similar topics. I use both Capture One and DxO and shoot RAW only. Each program supposedly uses the Q2 to render its lens and colors properly but they look different. What is the consensus on which program(s) and/or settings bring out the best and most natural colors in the Q2? Thank you!

Capture One's rendering of Q2 files taken in vivid light is poor in my opinion – the images just look "off" to me. And the C1 results are completely different than the color you get with Lightroom. Lightroom matches the in-camera JPEGs very closely.

[jaapv]

5 hours ago, hdmesa said:

Chasing color calibration is best left to printing professionals and may drive some people mad chasing perfect calibration. Most people will be fine without that if using a recent Mac and/or display that renders nearly full Display P3. Adobe RGB was ok for 1998, but no web browser or social media app will render Adobe RGB. Display P3 will show you exactly what users on current mobile devices will see since Instagram app, Facebook app, and all current web browsers honor and render Display P3 profiles. Display P3 is about as wide a profile as Adobe RGB but is a different chunk of the visible spectrum.

And if someone does not want to have a color-calibrated workflow: Capture One renders Q2 files taken in vivid sunrise/sunset light weirdly (incorrectly in my opinion), and that's not the user's fault nor responsibility to fix. The C1 team needs to provide a better Q2 profile. Lightroom provides a much more correct rendering of color with Q2 files taken at sunrise/sunset.

YMMV as they say.

https://creativepro.com/how-do-p3-displays-affect-your-workflow/

https://www.benq.com/en-us/knowledge-center/knowledge/display-p3-monitor-for-creative-work.html

I am flattered that you find me a printing professional - I am but a simple amateur. I cannot say that I find  that having a colour-calibrated workflow is akin to rocket science, in fact it is a  fairly basic process to get good colour in images. I started calibrating my monitor in 2004, after a series of important prints came back from the lab with a nasty green cast, and never stopped since... 
 My reward is less wasted printing paper, and regular critiques in photo-forums commenting positively on the colours of my images.
Your remark about Capture One proves my point. Use your own colour profile made with the -extremely simple- Xrite Colorchecker Passport (Technique: Make a  photo of the color chart and drag the image into the window of the software; the app does the rest automatically) and your problem with its goes away.
Having said that, the Q2, and other cameras for that matter, does struggle with sunsets a bit because of IR contamination, making them too yellow. Solution: fiddle a bit with the yellows  ( shift the hue and desaturate slightly) to make it look more natural, and save that setting as a sunset profile.

As to displays - it is not just about the gamut or the resolution;  it is about the precision of the RGB rendering and consistency over the whole screen. Apple has indeed come a long way over the last few years and is quite acceptable nowadays (but still too shiny and poppy - more meant for display than for editing) but the ones I mention are still considerably better. And Apple is very expensive for what it is.  Even on an iMac: deduct the price of a Mac Mini from the price of an iMac with the same computing innards and you have the price of the screen

As I said: Capture One does not make the colour: the user does and the default setting is just a starting point for your own interpretation of the output file. 

On a side-note: The colour rendering of the default profile of any postprocessing software is just the interpretation of the software engineer, nothing more. It is biased by his colour perception, which does not only vary per person, but even has a cultural component: people from different cultures see colours differently.  Compare it to the colour rendering of slide film: Japanese ones have a blue bias, American ones a red and German green. Most  people prefer the American rendering, though.

[jaapv]

Advertisement (gone after registration)

BTW, these are the three colour profiles mentioned. Adobe RGB is stil a bit more accurate for landscape, due to the extended rendering of blues and greens

 

 

Welcome, dear visitor! As registered member you'd see an image here…

Simply register for free here – We are always happy to welcome new members!

[KDW]

I find Capture One Pro 21 resolves images superbly from my Q2 RAW files - so much better than the washed out effort Lightroom used to give me

[hdmesa]

18 hours ago, jaapv said:

BTW, these are the three colour profiles mentioned. Adobe RGB is stil a bit more accurate for landscape, due to the extended rendering of blues and greens

 

 

Welcome, dear visitor! As registered member you'd see an image here…

Simply register for free here – We are always happy to welcome new members!

Adobe RGB is better for landscape? It depends on the colors in the landscape. I tend to get a lot of brown/yellow/orange/red (sky at sunset and a lot of dirt and volcanic rock) and very few greens being in the U.S. Southwest. I also personally tend to prefer warmer colors, so the experience of using a Display P3 monitor is more pleasing for me.

My point was today someone may not want to seek out an Adobe RGB monitor since a Display P3 monitor will show you exactly how your images will render on iPhone/Android and on all web browsers both mobile and on the computer. Both types of monitors will do fine for showing you what an sRGB image will look like online, but since Display P3 is the online standard today, why would you want to limit your exported images for online viewing to sRGB when you could be showing them in the wider profile of Display P3?

If you're editing the RAW, it's not in either color space yet, so you can export to any profile – makes no difference if your monitor is Adobe RGB or Display P3 since you're probably exporting to PSD or TIFF with the ProPhoto profile to print. But an Adobe RGB monitor is not showing you what you'll see online – anywhere – because hardly anyone has one, and even if they did, no web browser or mobile app honors that profile. And when presented with an Adobe RGB profile, a web browser or mobile app will display it as dull and flat because it does a crap conversion to sRGB.

In the end, regardless of what monitor you use, always export from RAW to Display P3 for online or mobile display. Never export from RAW to Adobe RGB and then later convert to Display P3 since you lose more color than you need to (see area in white below*). 

*/// EDIT: The below is also the reason I actually do advocate for JPEG-only shooters to use the Adobe RGB setting in-camera and then export to Display P3 in post – versus shooting sRGB in camera. By doing this, they get a wider gamut for the final images that all online viewers will be able to see and hopefully appreciate. Of course if you are doing this, you have to never forget to export to Display P3 before putting the images online because if you leave the Adobe RGB profile on the JPEG, they will look dull and washed out to the online viewer. /// 

 

Re: Calibration – I would amend your statement saying C1/LR profiles are "an engineer's idea of what the file should look like" to "a team of engineers trying to make the profiles render images that look as close to the in-camera JPEGs as possible". Profiles that don't align with in-camera JPEG profiles, yes, that's Adobe or Phase One's interpretation. For example, C1 and Lightroom's built-in profiles for Fujifilm's JPEG-matching simulations are scary-accurate to the JPEGs. Very impressive. And yes, those are all Fujifilm's ideas of some nice starting points for editing.

C1 and the Q2 are just in a bad place currently since the C1 profiles for the Q2 look weird. Sure, the Q2 is hard to get right, but Adobe did it very well and matches the in-camera JPEGs with their Adobe Color profile. The C1 team simply needs to try harder. It's almost as if they just renamed the original Q profile.

 

Edited October 16, 2021 by hdmesa

[jaapv]

Which is easily cured.by substituting your own profile.  I agree that Adobe does not do a bad job, but then Adobe and Leica do work together, whilst Phase One and Leica do not appear to be on speaking terms. 
Even then, I have always found that having a few of one's own profiles for different light conditions makes editing life a lot easier.

I fully agree to shoot and edit in the widest gamut possible (with the caveat to use only one step above the rendering ability of your display, to avoid major shifts in colour space conversion) and only to dumb down on exporting the final file. This applies as much or even more to raw editing. I always convert to Prophoto for editing. (Lightroom does this automatically due to its internal workflow) and save to  Adobe RGB for printing and sRGB for the Internet.

[jaapv]

17 hours ago, KDW said:

I find Capture One Pro 21 resolves images superbly from my Q2 RAW files - so much better than the washed out effort Lightroom used to give me

Welcome to the forum. Which means that there was something wrong with your LR settings. The whole message I am trying to get through here is that the colours you are getting are not determined by the software you are using but by the initial setting of the software you happen to be using. If you dislike the factory preset it is simple enough to substitute your ow defaults, but it appears to me to be more rational to adjust the program, unless you prefer another one anyway.

An editing program should be the one that offer the features and user interface that one likes. All the rest is user skill.

From trying out most of the major programs I find that any differences in output quality are minimal for 95% of the results. Obviously they all have a bias: for instance Lightroom is slanted to a good DAM and logical workflow, C1 towards colour editing (but has colour grading now), Photoshop to a galaxy of options beyond Lightroom, ON1 to easy use for beginners which can be expanded, Affinity to a compact program that rivals Lightroom, DXO to elaborate raw conversion and noise control, etc. 

This makes it a personal choice which cannot apply to anybody else, but the basics are always the same: use a good calibrated wide-gamut monitor, preferably one designed for photo editing, and if you can set the colour space work from a wide to a narrow one. Once you have converted form a wider to a more narrow one there is no going back. The colours that have been squeezed in are gone forever. And profile your camera using the Xrite Color Checker Passport and software (or Adobe's app but that takes a learning curve)

 

[jaapv]

7 hours ago, hdmesa said:

Adobe RGB is better for landscape? It depends on the colors in the landscape. I tend to get a lot of brown/yellow/orange/red (sky at sunset and a lot of dirt and volcanic rock) and very few greens being in the U.S. Southwest.

I find such landscapes are best edited using no colour space at all - RGB has some drawbacks like linking luminosity and colour. I tend to switch to LAB in such cases, editing the colour curves in the A and B channel and doing contrast and noise etc. in the L channel. 

[hdmesa]

6 hours ago, jaapv said:

I find such landscapes are best edited using no colour space at all - RGB has some drawbacks like linking luminosity and colour. I tend to switch to LAB in such cases, editing the colour curves in the A and B channel and doing contrast and noise etc. in the L channel. 

Yes, RAW doesn't have the color space yet. I was commenting about the viewing experience – that the color space of Display P3 works well for me anyway given the high amount of red-orange in the landscape here.

I've haven't messed around with LAB color in quite some time – I'll try it out again.

[hdmesa]

7 hours ago, jaapv said:

Which is easily cured.by substituting your own profile.  I agree that Adobe does not do a bad job, but then Adobe and Leica do work together, whilst Phase One and Leica do not appear to be on speaking terms. 
Even then, I have always found that having a few of one's own profiles for different light conditions makes editing life a lot easier.

I fully agree to shoot and edit in the widest gamut possible (with the caveat to use only one step above the rendering ability of your display, to avoid major shifts in colour space conversion) and only to dumb down on exporting the final file. This applies as much or even more to raw editing. I always convert to Prophoto for editing. (Lightroom does this automatically due to its internal workflow) and save to  Adobe RGB for printing and sRGB for the Internet.

Yes to all of that, but do try saving for online use with the Display P3 profile. It's a wider gamut and everyone online that also has a wider gamut monitor (iPhones, Mac laptops, and iMacs made in the last few years) will benefit. Anyone with a sRGB monitor will see your Display P3 image the same way they would have if you'd used sRGB on export.

[marchyman]

3 hours ago, hdmesa said:

Anyone with a sRGB monitor will see your Display P3 image the same way they would have if you'd used sRGB on export.

I was wondering about that.   Everything I use supports Display P3 but I've still been using sRGB for images exported for web use because tradition.  Or history.  Or something.   Might be time to change.