Before & After - Show us your edits

[elmars]

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vor 4 Stunden schrieb evikne:

Cool! Have you considered making a time lapse video of it?

Not til now. But I made a book out of these:

https://www.elmarstreyl.com/juliaandmarie

My son is part of the series but did not want in the internet. Girls are different in this regard.

[evikne]

7 minutes ago, elmars said:

Not til now. But I made a book out of these:

https://www.elmarstreyl.com/juliaandmarie

My son is part of the series but did not want in the internet. Girls are different in this regard.

A lovely series! Thank you for sharing!

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

[evikne]

I think this photo …

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… was better without these two in the background. 😊

 

Apart from cloning away the people, I increased the exposure a bit and pasted a manual white balance from a WhiBal card.

Shot with M10 and 35mm Summicron IV (an idiotic idea to take a 10,000 dollar camera out in a tiny two-person inflatable boat 🙈😬) 

[Jeff S]

On 12/30/2022 at 4:18 PM, evikne said:

Shot with M10 and 35mm Summicron IV (an idiotic idea to take a 10,000 dollar camera out in a tiny two-person inflatable boat 🙈😬) 

Not if you carry insurance. 
 

Jeff

[evikne]

2 hours ago, Jeff S said:

Not if you carry insurance. 

I don't. 😬

[Adam Bonn]

This won't be quite in keeping with the thread title!!

I have quite the little addiction to creating custom dcp profiles. 

I have quite a quirky taste in colours and they won't be to everyone's taste and I like to create a base for my edits using a base profile of my own design

So I'm going to show a photo with zero edits whatsoever !!!! 😅

 

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Photo on the left is the standard embedded Leica profile, the one on the right is where I like to start my edits from

 

This time the photo on the left is the standard Adobe profile, the one on the right is where I like to start my edits from

 

Of course sometimes my colours don't work out for a particular photo and need edits or of course I can just use either the standard adobe or Leica profile, but it's rewarding to have my own solution as an option

 

[erudolph]

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Just for fun, and this was kind of fun.  18mm SEM, M10M.  (I've tried several times but the After keeps loading before the Before.)

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[Alberti]

a common mistake: forgot to set exposure.

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In C1 I was not succesful. But then Lightroom came to the rescue: pushed Auto.

Leica M240. 28mm M-Rokkor 

The background has some noise, but nice in the prime focal areas.

Edited January 3, 2023 by Alberti

[jaapv]

Nice result. Maybe shift the colour balance slightly to blue?

[willeica]

I probably would not do this today, but some years ago when I took this I decided to crop this image and darken the background and then apply some TLC with Silver Efex. The resulting image won a prize and was published in LFI magazine. The taking equipment was an M9 and a 24mm Elmar.

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Today, I would be looking for a completely different type of image. As for editing tips, the best ones are the ones you have taught yourself.

The embarrassing thing is that I only found out afterwards that my younger daughter sails with the guy who owns this car. He owns the yacht which was used in Casino Royale for the James Bond sailing into Venice scene. No, that was not my daughter on the yacht with Bond, my daughter is a real sailor, not an actress. The car is, of course, worth a lot more than the yacht. I gave my daughter a copy of a print of this to give to the owner, but I'm not sure what he did with it. 

William 

 

[J.Haarmann]

Maybe some of you saw my coastline pictures. Here is an example before and after editing. Edited in CaptureOne, PS and ColorEfex.

Leica M9 - Super-Elmar-M 3,4/21

 

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Edited January 4, 2023 by J.Haarmann
Added camera and lens

[elmars]

Amazing!

[Besprosvet]

On 1/1/2023 at 1:34 PM, Adam Bonn said:

This won't be quite in keeping with the thread title!!

I have quite the little addiction to creating custom dcp profiles. 

I have quite a quirky taste in colours and they won't be to everyone's taste and I like to create a base for my edits using a base profile of my own design

So I'm going to show a photo with zero edits whatsoever !!!! 😅

 

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!

Photo on the left is the standard embedded Leica profile, the one on the right is where I like to start my edits from

 

This time the photo on the left is the standard Adobe profile, the one on the right is where I like to start my edits from

 

Of course sometimes my colours don't work out for a particular photo and need edits or of course I can just use either the standard adobe or Leica profile, but it's rewarding to have my own solution as an option

 

Leica embedded profile? I thought adobe color(s) were the only one available on lightroom

[Adam Bonn]

4 hours ago, Besprosvet said:

Leica embedded profile? I thought adobe color(s) were the only one available on lightroom

you have to click on the four square thing just above the WB tool and you'll see all the options

 

[evikne]

Outdoors in natural light, I often prefer the embedded Leica M10 profile. Blue sky looks very natural, and shadows and highlights are well preserved. But in artificial light, the embedded profile looks ugly. Blonde hair turns a nasty greenish-yellow color.

The only difference between these two photos is the color profile:

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Edited January 5, 2023 by evikne

[Adam Bonn]

10 hours ago, evikne said:

But in artificial light, the embedded profile looks ugly. Blonde hair turns a nasty greenish-yellow color.

It’s because the embedded profile is very basic, containing only two “color matrices”

In the DNG spec document adobe recommends that profiles contain also forward matrices

The color matrices map from a colour space (in Leica/adobe dcp it’s XYZ StdA and D65) to the camera’s native RAW colour

(This is basically how white balance works)

But the end destination is XYZ D50 and the forward matrices, let’s just say forward (because it’s early and I haven’t had coffee yet and chromatic adaptation is a long and boring subject) both the colour matrices to D50.

This isn’t an optional thing, with no forward matrices to specify the D50 path the adobe pipeline will effectively guess the route 

This isn’t any big drama for sunny outdoor light as D65 to D50 isn’t a big thing. But for indoor artificial light it’s hard work and the guess isn’t always great (although to be fair I can’t think of too many times that I’ve seen the words  indoor artificial light and great colours in the same sentence)

Overall this tends to give the Leica profiles ‘punch’ as they’re effectively linear.

Adobe profiles have far more content, they do have forward matrices and also HSD LUTs (and a subjective ‘adobe look’ LUT) the HSD LUTs provide the profile with the ability to manage hues across exposure changes. Their methodology has evolved over the years, back in the 2000s their profiles had quite beefy forward matrices and the HSD just tried to keep everything in gamut. These days adobe forward matrices are somewhat anaemic (to control gamut) and the HSDs bring the saturation back up.

 

[hansvons]

11 hours ago, evikne said:

Blue sky looks very natural, and shadows and highlights are well preserved. But in artificial light, the embedded profile looks ugly. Blonde hair turns a nasty greenish-yellow color.

If you were to shoot the same image on film, it would have turned out even nastier. Even the most advanced Kodak cine stock cannot cope with that. The reason is that in that situation, the light sources are heterogenous and funky in terms of spectrum. The laptop screen exhibits cool daylight mixed with the colours that the screen shows, illuminating the boy's face and affecting the skin colour disadvantageously. The backlight on the boy's hair is quite likely some tungsten source (most likely a cheap LED in a warm flavour. They are super-funky). And the background might be lit by daylight coming through windows, which, as every window does, adds some greenish tint.

The million-dollar question is, why does the Adobe profile cope so well? @Adam Bonn gave some explanations/insights I cannot comment on because I'm not a colour scientist/physicist. But I do know that great colour needs great light. If you shoot in great light and the colours look dim and boring, there might be an issue with the colour interpretation. My experience is that the Adobe approach does exactly that: making everything look boring. You cannot have both great colours in great light and great colours in a bad light. Something has to give.

[Adam Bonn]

Here is a crappy picture of my cat, taken with an M10 under crappy indoor light.

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This picture has not been edited in any single way and was taken with AWB

The one on the left is with the M10 Embedded profile

The one on the right is exactly the same profile, except I've used maths to calculate and add into the profile a linear Bradford derived forward matrix for each illuminant.

I've heard it said that the Leica M10 profile has too much yellow in it under artificial light now this appears to be true but what's actually happening is that both pictures have the same amount of yellow, the forward matrix simply tells abobe where to place the yellow

The difference varies on the picture and the light, and the camera (the M10R embedded profile is better in artificial light IMO)

Now we haven't made great colours here but what we've done is get the RAW data to the 'ballpark'

So to be short and sweet, what I did here was this:

Hey adobe rather than guess how to get to D50 from StdA (aka from white balance 2800 to 5000) in order to display the colours - instead please follow this map that I wrote for you

The maths for this can be found in the adobe dng spec here (see chapter MAPPING CAMERA COLOR SPACE TO CIE XYZ SPACE, starts on page 85, bit that you need is on p87) and the linear Bradford chromatic adaptation maths can be found here 

(you'll also need a way to convert dcp to and from a text format, dcamprof or dcptool are free, and a way to extract the Leica profile from the DNG, Adobe's DNG Profile editor is your friend there, also free. As well you'll need some maths ability...)

To quote adobe (who invented DNG, and dcp profiles) on the subject of forward matrices 

Quote

The use of the forward matrix tags is recommended for two reasons. First, it allows the camera profile creator to control the chromatic adaptation algorithm used to convert between the calibration illuminant and D50. Second, it causes the white balance adjustment (if the user white balance does not match the calibration illuminant) to be done by scaling the camera coordinates rather than by adapting the resulting XYZ values, which has been found to work better in extreme cases.

"The use of the forward matrix tags is recommended" is basically tech speak for you REALLY should be doing this when using our RAW and profiling solution

And that's exactly what's happening here* - the ginger cat, on the orange cushion, in front of the yellow cushion under mixed indoor lighting** is causing an extreme case which the forward matrix-less Leica profile is giving the adobe image pipeline trouble to try and adapt the XYZ values.

Why Leica doesn't include forward matrices is a bit of a mystery to me...

If all of this seems a massive PITA (it is!) then just use a proper WB card to set a custom WB in camera before shooting under shitty yellowy-orange light 😀

Oh and this tool in LR/ACR

Gives you the ability to override the native adobe XYZ_D50 adaptation (that's why it's in the tab marked 'Calibration')

Hopefully that's de-mystified what's going on under the hood a little...

*yes as a profile geek I deliberately shot this to test the Leica profile on the day I got my M10, I know it's a torture test for any camera

**mrs Adam loves orangey colours, hence the cushions, the cat, the f**king bright orange wall lamp that I have to remember to turn off when I'm snapping some family gathering 😅

 

[Adam Bonn]

2 hours ago, hansvons said:

The million-dollar question is, why does the Adobe profile cope so well? @Adam Bonn gave some explanations/insights I cannot comment on because I'm not a colour scientist/physicist. But I do know that great colour needs great light. If you shoot in great light and the colours look dim and boring, there might be an issue with the colour interpretation. My experience is that the Adobe approach does exactly that: making everything look boring. You cannot have both great colours in great light and great colours in a bad light. Something has to give.

I've attached two text files 

One is the Leica profile for the M10-R, the other is the adobe standard profile for the M10-R

Don't get too bogged down (unless you want too) in what all the numbers mean, but just see how much more content adobe feels a profile needs than Leica does....

So from the adobe one

  "CalibrationIlluminant1": "StdA",

means the first illuminant is StdA (about 2800 kelvin or 1.09850 1.00000 0.35585 in XYZ)

  "ColorMatrix1": [
    [  0.634100, -0.330100,  0.025500 ],
    [ -0.484100,  1.272600,  0.235400 ],
    [ -0.068700,  0.198700,  0.653800 ]

This maps FROM StdA to the un-white balanced RAW values of the Leica M10-R (this is what you are making when you shoot a colorchecker and open it in the X-Rite profile software)

The profile needs this to know how to get RAW colours into XYZ

The above is then repeated for D65.

After this Leica just stops!!

But with abobe next we have

  "ForwardMatrix1": [
    [  0.455000,  0.405200,  0.104100 ],
    [  0.296000,  0.671200,  0.032800 ],
    [  0.163100,  0.001100,  0.660800 ]

I wrote about this in the post above, so I won't repeat)

So far then

UN-white-balanced RAW data to XYZ_StdA, then Forwarded to XYZ_D50 (that's midday sun btw)

Next with adobe we have

  "ProfileHueSatMapDims": [ 90, 30, 1 ],

(that's 100s of lines so I won't post here, see the attachment) but let's pick a random line

{ "HueDiv":  1, "SatDiv": 28, "ValDiv":  0, "HueShift":   1.644445, "SatScale": 1.031933, "ValScale": 1.680113 },

That's a LITTLE BIT like the HSL tool

take this colour, then hue shift it, then saturate it and lighten/darken it

In short and more conceptual than accurate (but easier to understand) what's happening here is that the profile is seeking to keep the colours the same even when the contrast changes 

Again Leica does none of this.

Finally we have 

  "ProfileLookTableDims": [ 36, 8, 16 ],

This is the "adobe look" it's a set of subjective (highly subjective if you ask me...) colour and hue adjustments that are applied after everything else that adobe thinks look good (and usually concern what happens with clipping and their effect on colours)

And I agree, adobe colours bore the crap out of me, they start off boring then endeavour very hard to stay boring under any situation you may wish to photograph . OMWV

(No wonder the 'auto' tool in LR often adds +20 vibrance !!!!)

Still like sugar in coffee it's easier to add saturation afterwards then take it away, which is why adobe does this (and other stuff like cameras with more DR than computer screens have and folks increasing use of wide gamut work flows)

LEICA M10-R Adobe Standard.txt

 

Leica M10-R.txt

Edited January 6, 2023 by Adam Bonn

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[jaapv]

The pragmatic solution to this problem (and the yellows under some types of artificial light is part of the IR sensitivity of all M digital cameras) is to use a greycard white balance which will turn out slightly cool, which is easily corrected. 
if you run into this with an AWB shot the not-really simple solution is to go into L*A*B* which separates colour from luminance. The linking of colour and luminance is one of the weaknesses of RGB.