Visualizing DNG Camera Profiles Part 3

In this post, I'll look at the renderings of the various Adobe DNG profiles on a profile by profile basis.

If you haven't taken a look at Part 1 of this, I'd strongly suggest you do - it's there that I set the scene for these charts, and talk about how to interpret them. Part two is here.

As a reminder, what we're looking at here is the color rendition embedded in the various default Adobe camera profiles for the Canon 5DII. We're looking at that for colors that approximate to the key color patches on a Gretag Macbeth 24 patch color chart. Also, remember that the various "camera" profiles are intended to mimic the camera settings, not necessarily to be what Adobe might consider to be pleasing color renditions.

Firstly, the Adobe Standard profile:

The Adobe standard is really very "neutral" it stays quite close to being a conventional "conversion matrix" based color rendition, similar to the previous generations of Adobe profiles. There are very few hue twists to be seen, and only some color value compression in on red and blue.

Now the Camera Standard Profile:

Camera Standard is bit further from a "plain vanilla" rendering. Here we see more aggressive compression of the red and blue, extending to magenta as well. Also green and yellow have "twists" to them.

The Camera Portrait profile:

Camera Portrait is, as you might expect, really quite aggressive with its changes to the conventional "plain vanilla" camera rendering. Red, magenta and cyan are heavily twisted, and blue is again compressed, as is green.

The Camera Neutral Profile:

The Camera Neutral profile is an interesting one. Both red and magenta a quite close to vanilla for a while, but them abruptly flatted out in value almost completely. Blue and cyan are compressed, and green twists quite substantially.

The Camera Landscape profile:

Camera Landscape is, as we might expect, heavily "compressed", and has some quite substantial twists. Green, red, blue are both compressed and twisted, as is yellow, not a color that other profiles have compressed very much.

And finally, the Camera Faithful profile:

Camera Faithful turns out to be very similar, perhaps unsurprisingly, to Camera Neutral, only quite subtle differences - e.g., in magenta, separating them. But theses are differences subtle enough that I doubt that it would be possible to tell the difference in practice - differences in the tone curves of the two profiles are more likely to be visible than these differences.

So what are commonalities?

• Well, there's a fairly common pattern of the the primaries (red, blue, green) being compressed, and for red to be twisted towards magenta, and blue towards magenta
• The skin tones tend to be left alone, probably because human vision is quite sensitive to any variation here. Similarly, yellow is mostly left alone, perhaps because its quite close to skin tones. Camera Landscape is the exception to yellows being fairly unprocessed, perhaps in the interest of more attractive greens