Why are the colors different in Lightroom? (Using Profile M11)

[Mogen]

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Hey all,

I think the colors look great straight out of camera on the M11. However, once it's imported into Lightroom (CC), I noticed that the contrast and colors (particulary the sky) are different from the in-camera image, even after using the Lightroom profile 'PROFILE M11'.

It seems like to simple white balance and contrast does not give the same results as the built-in profile, unless there's something I'm missing. It seems quite difficult to match the sky without using an HSL slider.

Has anyone experienced this issue and found a way to match Lightroom colors settings to the original?

 

Left: Lightroom CC
Right: macOS Preview (which matches the colors on the back of the camera)

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Edited July 13, 2024 by Mogen

[adan]

Short version - what you see in Mac Preview is simply a "cheap and fast" jpeg preview as processed by the M11 itself, in a few milliseconds, with no involvement by Adobe, and then embedded in the .DNG file as it is written to the SD card or internal memory.

What you see in Lightroom is the actual raw data in the .DNG file (something different, and not itself yet a viewable photograph), as processed by LightRoom (according to built-in decisions and assumptions from Adobe software engineers), on a Mac computer (with programming by Apple engineers), using the "M11 profile" also embedded in the .DNG.

With such different processing chains, it can be expected that there will be differences in how the "final picture" looks.

Longer Version - available if you have more questions.

Edited July 13, 2024 by adan

[evikne]

A short answer: Try switching to the Adobe Color profile instead. It's probably more similar to the colors you see in your preview

[Malabito]

I rarely use the m11 profile in lightroom, unless its something that i want to look quite vivid. Skin tones are extremely red with the m11 profile, even with the saturations and hue modified.

So i used 90% of the time the adobe standard profile....works great and its less vivid, saturated. 

[Smogg]

13 minutes ago, Malabito said:

I rarely use the m11 profile in lightroom, unless its something that i want to look quite vivid. Skin tones are extremely red with the m11 profile, even with the saturations and hue modified.

So i used 90% of the time the adobe standard profile....works great and its less vivid, saturated. 

The same

[elmars]

It doesn't just depend on which Adobe profile you use (Adobe Color is a bit more contrasty and has slightly different skin tones in comparison to Adobe Standard) or whether you use the M11 profile (which is less complex and the colors are slightly different from Adobe), it mainly depends on the fact that Leica DNGs are somewhat restrained in their exposure and tend to have less contrast. This has been the case since the M9 and probably has to do with the fact that the highlights are best preserved this way. With JPGs, which, as Adan already mentioned, are also generated for the preview images in the camera, contrast and exposure are increased so that the result looks "better". Lightroom replaces these preview JPGs of the camera during import with its own preview images, which largely dispense with this contrast and exposure enhancement.

[jaapv]

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4 hours ago, Mogen said:

Has anyone experienced this issue and found a way to match Lightroom colors settings to the original?

It is an essential function of Lightroom...

https://lightroom.adobe.com/learn/tutorial/8c8592ba-1474-4555-88c4-0bc72d4efae1

You need to have an Adobe account to access these tutorials.

 

https://digital-photography-school.com/using-camera-color-profiles-lightroom/

https://expertphotography.com/editing-color-lightroom/

And many, many tutorials more. Use Google. 

[LBJ2]

*

Edited July 13, 2024 by LBJ2

[LBJ2]

10 hours ago, adan said:

Short version - what you see in Mac Preview is simply a "cheap and fast" jpeg preview as processed by the M11 itself, in a few milliseconds, with no involvement by Adobe, and then embedded in the .DNG file as it is written to the SD card or internal memory.

What you see in Lightroom is the actual raw data in the .DNG file (something different, and not itself yet a viewable photograph), as processed by LightRoom (according to built-in decisions and assumptions from Adobe software engineers), on a Mac computer (with programming by Apple engineers), using the "M11 profile" also embedded in the .DNG.

With such different processing chains, it can be expected that there will be differences in how the "final picture" looks.

Longer Version - available if you have more questions.

You wrote: "what you see in Mac Preview is simply a "cheap and fast" jpeg preview " 

Is there some official Apple Preview reference where I can read more about this?

Edited July 13, 2024 by LBJ2

[marchyman]

2 hours ago, LBJ2 said:

Is there some official Apple Preview reference where I can read more about this?

Not that I am aware of.  My guess is that the Preview app uses Apple's Core Image framework for processing.   Core image defines CIRawFilter to create an image from raw data.  There are over 30 parameters that can be set to a multitude of values to control how the image is decoded.  There are also several different raw decoder versions.

The developer doc for Core Image is at https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreimage but that's really for people who want to write their own code for processing images and won't tell you anything about what Preview does.

 

[LBJ2]

2 minutes ago, marchyman said:

Not that I am aware of.  My guess is that the Preview app uses Apple's Core Image framework for processing.   Core image defines CIRawFilter to create an image from raw data.  There are over 30 parameters that can be set to a multitude of values to control how the image is decoded.  There are also several different raw decoder versions.

The developer doc for Core Image is at https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreimage but that's really for people who want to write their own code for processing images and won't tell you anything about what Preview does.

 

"Mac Preview is simply a "cheap and fast" jpeg preview"

I'm not challenging the statement, but one of those forum comments that sends me googling out of curiosity which almost always results in learning something. As usual with macOS it may not be as simple as "jpeg preview"... Reading up on CIRAWFilter now ✅

[adan]

6 hours ago, LBJ2 said:

You wrote: "what you see in Mac Preview is simply a "cheap and fast" jpeg preview " 

Is there some official Apple Preview reference where I can read more about this?

It is not really an "Apple Preview" thing - it is a function of how almost all digital camera "raw" (as in "raw, unprocessed data") files work.

Your quote left out an important part of my comment - "...... a "cheap and fast" jpeg preview as processed by the M11 itself, in a few milliseconds,.......and then embedded in the .DNG file as it is written to the SD card or internal memory."

Preview is not a raw processor, and cannot process and display the raw data in a raw digital image file (such as a Leica .dng, but also any other camera raw format: .nef, .crw, etc.). 

But it can read and display ready-made images such as the embedded jpeg "thumbnail" or "preview" image included in most raw files by the camera.

Therefore Preview can show you the thumbnail(s) created by the M11.

But that viewable image built by the M11's firmware can be different from the viewable image built by Adobe's Lightroom software from the same raw data.

Analogy (apologies to those who find this disgusting 😉😞

Take a pile of raw ground beef, mustard, ketchup, pickles, onions, lettuce, etc. The raw ingredients of a meal.

- hand them to McDonald's, and you get a "fast food" meal in 5 minutes. = The raw data as "cooked" by the M11 and then displayed exactly as created, by Preview
- hand them to a 5-Star Michelin chef, and you get a different meal, in 30 minutes. = The raw data as "cooked" by LightRoom (or Capture Raw, or other raw processors) and displayed by that software.

A bit of an exaggeration, but the same idea.

(BTW, I recall a TV news segment from around 1980, where a reporter actually did that (news peg was the first opening of a corporate McDonald's in France). The haute-cuisine-prepared version of a "Big Mac" was different, naturally).

Edited July 13, 2024 by adan

[Jeff S]

26 minutes ago, adan said:

BTW, I recall a TV news segment from around 1980, where a reporter actually did that (news peg was the first opening of a corporate McDonald's in France). The haute-cuisine-prepared version of a "Big Mac" was different, naturally).

Reminds me…

Jeff

[LBJ2]

13 hours ago, adan said:

It is not really an "Apple Preview" thing - it is a function of how almost all digital camera "raw" (as in "raw, unprocessed data") files work.

Your quote left out an important part of my comment - "...... a "cheap and fast" jpeg preview as processed by the M11 itself, in a few milliseconds,.......and then embedded in the .DNG file as it is written to the SD card or internal memory."

Preview is not a raw processor, and cannot process and display the raw data in a raw digital image file (such as a Leica .dng, but also any other camera raw format: .nef, .crw, etc.). 

But it can read and display ready-made images such as the embedded jpeg "thumbnail" or "preview" image included in most raw files by the camera.

Therefore Preview can show you the thumbnail(s) created by the M11.

But that viewable image built by the M11's firmware can be different from the viewable image built by Adobe's Lightroom software from the same raw data.

Analogy (apologies to those who find this disgusting 😉😞

Take a pile of raw ground beef, mustard, ketchup, pickles, onions, lettuce, etc. The raw ingredients of a meal.

- hand them to McDonald's, and you get a "fast food" meal in 5 minutes. = The raw data as "cooked" by the M11 and then displayed exactly as created, by Preview
- hand them to a 5-Star Michelin chef, and you get a different meal, in 30 minutes. = The raw data as "cooked" by LightRoom (or Capture Raw, or other raw processors) and displayed by that software.

A bit of an exaggeration, but the same idea.

(BTW, I recall a TV news segment from around 1980, where a reporter actually did that (news peg was the first opening of a corporate McDonald's in France). The haute-cuisine-prepared version of a "Big Mac" was different, naturally).

Agree. I think what you wrote here concerning the embedded jpeg/thumbnail is fairly well known with plenty of reliable references across the internet for some years now ✅

My interest is to determine if the macOS Preview app as of macOS Sonoma, is rendering as you stated  the  "cheap and fast" jpeg preview as processed by the M11 itself, in a few milliseconds,.......and then embedded in the .DNG file as it is written to the SD card or internal memory."...Or is the Preview app rendering the RAW/DNG file which is what I am curious about, but can't seem to find any official confirmation one way or the other. 

For instance, when I pull up a full sized M11 DNG file through Preview on macOS Sonoma, the image is very high quality with plenty of data. The Preview Inspector tool confirms the full lsize DNG file as well. When I view the M11's embedded jpeg Preview in LRC or Lightroom, it is a much smaller file and doesn't hold up to magnification at all--aka falls apart pretty quickly as expected of such a small "Preview" file.

Also, when I view an M11 RAW/DNG file in Preview and then again in Apple's Photos Editor it looks and feels similar. 

Based upon my experience working with Preview, I'm currently leaning toward @marchyman comment above:

"My guess is that the Preview app uses Apple's Core Image framework for processing. Core image defines CIRawFilter to create an image from raw data.  There are over 30 parameters that can be set to a multitude of values to control how the image is decoded.  There are also several different raw decoder versions." 

Edited July 14, 2024 by LBJ2

[elmars]

vor 2 Stunden schrieb LBJ2:

My interest is to determine if the macOS Preview app as of macOS Sonoma, is rendering as you stated  the  "cheap and fast" jpeg preview as processed by the M11 itself, in a few milliseconds,.......and then embedded in the .DNG file as it is written to the SD card or internal memory."...Or is the Preview app rendering the RAW/DNG file which is what I am curious about, but can't seem to find any official confirmation one way or the other

You can find out easily by Yourself. Set Your camera to DNG only but Your jpg settings to black and white. The camera preview will be black and white but an Apple preview would be in color. 

[LBJ2]

4 minutes ago, elmars said:

You can find out easily by Yourself. Set Your camera to DNG only but Your jpg settings to black and white. The camera preview will be black and white but an Apple preview would be in color. 

Yes. Just tried your test for myself. Same color result in the Preview app. Thank you for the suggestion.