Support for Pentax K3

ChrisM

February 08, 2014 13:30

[quote="Peter" wrote:
Hello ChrisM, Keith and Drew

I have to say that this is not PhaseOnes's finest hour. The corporate watchword these days is transparency. But PhaseOne seems to have its own Big Stopper! (I am of course joking/teasing - but it is a serious point.)

So, Cap1 or DxO? Or, how about Silkypix or even Pentax itself? All RAW converters have strengths and weaknesses. Like Keith, I find that while DxO does a superb job with lens distortions the colour tones of the output image are nowhere near as 'good' as Cap1. (Of course 'good' is relative - one man's meat etc.) When I use DxO I use 'neutral colour' mode knowing that I will be reprocessing the tif output. (I find LR5 is good at revitalising the colours). Conversely, when I use Cap1 I know I will have to apply a lens correction elsewhere (PTLens is good). So may I suggest that despite PhaseOne's current shortcomings as far as K-3 is concerned there are workarounds.

You have turned to DxO - a good choice. But I don't understand the exchange you have had with their staff. As I understand it, a raw RAW file (i.e. unprocessed) has no colour information apart from the in-camera colour temperature setting. Even as it is being processed the 'image' is just a mathematical model that is presented to a colour monitor that visualises what the image would look like if our brains could process the raw mathematical data.

The monitor is pre-programmed to make the best of the raw model. It relies on a graphics card and colour-calibrated driver and (for a price) it offers a choice of a sRGB look or an Adobe RGB look. But at no stage does it impose this on the raw model. When you are satisfied with the image you save it, making an appropriate selection from the options available in the software - tif, jpeg, sRGB etc. So DxO are correct in pointing out that you can save in sRGB and Adobe RGB colour space. Likewise, Cap1 of course. My understanding is that it is at this point that some tonal clipping can occur - remember, there is no 'colour' as we understand it, but our brains interpret it as a colour. (All electromagnetic radiation is colourless until it interacts with the physical world with a mix of absorption and reflection.)

So if DxO outputs are inferior to Cap1 output colours (and I agree that they are) the 'fault' may not lie in the DxO colour algorithms. My suspicion is that the root cause is poor handling of the contrast/tonality envelope and a DxO obsession with removing any hint of luminance and colour noise.

Hello Peter,

DxO is pre-programmed and locked to use Adobe Rgb (or a very similar gamut) as their working space. CO1 (or Iridient developer or Raw therapee) all enable the use to select a working space of choice. The working space in DxO however means conversion of the raw data to data that fits within this working space gamut. Hence all data from the camera that is outside this working space, is clipped. Choosing a larger space as output space does not bring these clipped colors back.
I have an image of vibrantly yellow sunflowers in bright sunlight that I use to visually test the color qualities of a raw converter. CO1 uses the full gamut and does it really well with use of their generic camera profile. The .tiff image that it produces, if color tagged with a large enough space, preserves many vibrant colors that both my screens (a led Macbook pro screen and an Eizo Coloredge screen) can show to some degree (albeit only in selective parts of the gamut) beyond the Adobe colorspace (Both screens are calibrated with the X-rite i1 display pro, that is also optimized for led screens). This is easily proven when comparing a CO1 image to a .tiff image that is processed with DxO optics and tagged with the same large colorspace. It looks dull and lacks the vibrancy of the CO1 image. That this is not caused by inferior color processing from DxO in itself, can be proven by simply taking the CO1 image, and convert it to the Adobe Rgb colorspace, or worse: to the Srgb colorspace. The same lack of vibrancy appears. Not long ago I had a discussion with Phase one on their Jpeg color management, because a similar clipping occurs when storing catalogues in Jpeg, and viewing them from within Capture one. This all mainly effects images with vibrant colors in the yellow region, because this is exactly where the Adobe Rgb colorspace is relatively narrow. It was actually devised by someone at Adobe to encompass greens better, but this person must have had little affection for vibrant yellow and surrounding parts of the spectrum.
My "gripe" with DxO, is that they do the clipping at the Raw developing stage. Should I go back and reprocess all my DxO images when the new generation wide gamut LED screens are here, and should I accept color clipping with fine art printing?
Also: even when most of the clipped colors are outside the gamut of many screens and printers, still the conversion to smaller colorspaces of images that are captured in large color spaces and actually occupy a lot of that large spectrum, always harms the color rendition of the image. Images that are captured, but only have a small color gamut will not suffer, but don't try your favorite flower shots with DxO, the clipping takes the life out of the images.
To objectively prove what my eyes had already seen, I took both .tiff images (CO1 and DxO) into Colorthink pro and this showed exactly what I suspected: the DxO image was indeed clipped to a gamut that almost exactly shared its borders with the Adobe Rgb colorspace, while the CO1 image had a gamut that stretched al the way to the borders of the yellow part of the spectrum locus (a horse shoe shaped form that indicates the borders of the visible (to human eyes) color spectrum). I am aware that this may sound dangerously color-geeky, but when the visible effect of color-loss in vibrant images is the first thing you see when you try out a new raw converter, than all you want is the colors to come back, but try as I might, no way to do it with DxO, clipped and gone forever, at least in the processed file.
So Phase one has poor Jpeg color management (even Iphoto can manage Jpegs in the prophoto colorspace, think jpegs of vivid flowers!), but this is only a displaying matter. What DxO does to your images when processing from raw, is just not believable in 2014.
Regarding working spaces: there are options besides Prophoto, that has a 1.8 tone curve and isn't ideal. Joseph Holmes made some very good working spaces for images captured with digital cameras. I use DCAM 4 (with a similar gamut to Prophoto, but with a much more natural tone curve) all the time in CO1 with great results.

This is all perhaps slightly off topic, but still, it goes to show that not all raw converters have the professional approach that CO1 has. After all, even Lightroom or Photoshop still do not allow free choice of working space, but at least they use a very large space (Prophoto with 2.2 gamma), unlike DxO optics...

Regards
Chris

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Drew Altdo

February 10, 2014 08:45

[quote="Christoph2" wrote:
Are there plans _when_ the next release with the support for the K3 will be released?

Soon.

Sorry we can't please everyone. We truly did our best to let you know that we are working on it and are sorry we can't provide a specific date. The reasons are pretty simple, should testing a new version find a major issue we'll delay the release and thus add to the anxiety/frustration. We'd like to avoid that at all cost so the rather unfortunate and definitive stance is that we have to adhere to the Forum Rule #1.
Being a small company, things change quickly and frequently along with the market so a public Roadmap is just not in the cards.

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April 27, 2021 07:32

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