A more neutral starting point in the wide gamut Working Color Space

DxO PhotoLab Feature requests
1

The “Neutral Color, Neutral Tonality” rendering profile has long been a valuable option in DxO PhotoLab. It offers a pleasantly subdued starting point that’s ideal for RAW processing. However, this rendering is currently only available when using the Classic (Legacy) Working Color Space.

When working in the Wide Gamut WCS, the available “Neutral” rendering produces significantly more saturated colors and higher contrast compared to its Classic counterpart. While it’s possible to manually reduce contrast, lower saturation, and adjust individual color channels using the HSL tool, this approach requires considerably more effort to achieve similar results.

Requested Feature:

Please add the “Neutral Color, Neutral Tonality” rendering profile as an option within the Wide Gamut Working Color Space.

Benefits:

  • Maintains workflow continuity for users transitioning from Classic to Wide Gamut WCS

  • Provides a truly neutral starting point while leveraging the expanded color capabilities of Wide Gamut

  • Reduces unnecessary post-processing steps for photographers who prefer subtler initial renderings

  • Allows users to benefit from Wide Gamut’s technical advantages without sacrificing the aesthetic starting point many of us rely on

Use Case:

For photographers who value a restrained initial rendering as a foundation for selective enhancements, having this option in Wide Gamut would combine the best of both worlds: technical color accuracy with artistic restraint.

Thank you for considering this request.

2

So why not do that once and then save the tweaks as a new preset, which you can use as your default preset?

Much quicker, and far more effective, than waiting for DxO to implement your feature request.

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3

I have done exactly that. But the results are not nearly as acceptable for my uses as the Neutral Color, Neutral Tonality rendering.

I believe DxO PL could benefit from having a flatter starting point in the wide gamut WCS. I see value in requesting a feature for the long term, while using a work around in the near term. I don’t see the two actions as mutually exclusive.

4

I wrote to support about this not long after Wide Gamut was introduced in PL6. Had DxO wanted to make it easy for existing users to adopt Wide Gamut they would have provided equivalents of the Legacy renderings, instead of having us reinvent the wheel. I also found the Wide Gamut renderings to be overly saturated/contrasty, but my solution was to just stick with Legacy. Wide Gamut doesn’t solve a problem I know I have.

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5

Isn’t that what the saturation and contrast sliders are for?

You do you, but perhaps the Wide Gamut was undoing a “too muted” problem that existed previously.

6

thank you for this helpful response.

7

My thoughts, exactly. I do wish the roll-out of wide gamut WCS a few versions back had a more diverse set of default color renderings—or at least ported versions of the classic color space profiles. The two neutral color, neutral tonality presets were (and are) something very special. Would be grand to use them in a wider WCS, but I’m content to use the classic rendering setting as you suggest.

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8

It was in response to @asvensson.

Everyone finds some default treatments to be not to their taste.

9

No one’s saying it’s impossible to tweak a Wide Gamut rendering with sliders to get a new starting point you might be happy with, although it’s easier said than done to reproduce another rendering. Just like it also wasn’t impossible for me to re-rotate the hundreds of my images that PL5 broke when it started reading xmp with no way to disable it, or it wouldn’t be impossible to revisit all the images I’ve used PRIME on to adapt to that method being removed from PL9 (DeepPRIME 3 is not a drop-in replacement in all cases), etc.

If you’re happy to spend time adapting to these kinds of changes, then you’re more tolerant than I am. Or just use PL for export-and-forget and aren’t bothered with older edits no longer being respected.

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10

It’s a cliche for a reason… the only constant is change.

I used to spend days or weeks tweaking operating systems, web sites, software, and more to do exactly what I wanted. Then I got old and started valuing my time more. For the most part, I cannot meaningfully influence these things, so I just accept the change and move forward.

The only thing that stops me from upgrading to any version (apart from financial considerations) is when something is broken.

It’s also fair to say my editing process is probably less consistent than the software feature set. I’m constantly learning and changing, myself.

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11

Exactly, which is why I have no time for software that intentionally breaks functionality. Or, if it’s not intentional (although that’s a tough argument with the removal of PRIME), whose developers show no interest in doing anything about it.

PL is a still nice editor, but PL8 is the end of the line for me.

12

Intentional breakage is a matter of viewpoint.

Unfortunately for you, your values do not align with those of DxO.

13

Of course. If you don’t value backwards compatibility then it’s not an issue, but for me it’s a fairly important property of any editor to open a file in the same state I left it in.

Luminar 18 was also a nice editor, but in that case it only took a few minor updates to realize that the developers didn’t value backwards compatibility. At all. With DxO the breakage hasn’t been as often, but it has happened with regularity, and with PL9 it clearly wasn’t a mistake with PRIME. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if they eventually remove the Legacy colour space as well, and in that case they will literally break every one of my edits.

For me, it’s not worth it any more when there are other excellent options to choose from.

3 Likes
14

In case anyone’s interested, I received the following response from Support following recent communication with them regarding PL8.5 having broken the rendering of colour in PhotoLibrary and the Customize filmstrip for images using Legacy, which is still not fixed on Windows in PL8.12, 9 months after PL8.5 was released. (It has been fixed on Mac, in PL8.10 I think it was.)

Blockquote
They asked me to emphasise that the ‘Classic (Legacy)’ colour space is only retained in PhotoLab for compatibility reasons, and that new corrections or features will only be compatible with the newer DxO Wide Gamut alternative.

(“They” being the developers.)

I haven’t seen this communicated anywhere before, but it seems DxO has already effectively dropped support for Legacy.

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15

“new corrections”…

That does not imply to me that an image previously processed with Legacy will be affected in any way. If no new changes are made.

This would be the same as in Lightroom. If you have old photos that you return to, you may be asked to “update the rendering engine” or some such wording, in order to make futher changes.

Granted DxO have only two colour spaces, but I guess they’re concentrating on the more capable one going forwards. For Adobe, it makes total sense or they’d be supporting possibly tens of different engines.

16

Except that the rendition of colour in PhotoLibrary and the Customize filmstrip isn’t accurate as long as DxO doesn’t fix the bug.

Not really. It’s a question of being able to accurately view images you’ve processed in Legacy - which is every single one of mine since PL1 - without having to enter Customize. Fairly inconvenient to not have this on Windows.

More capable only because DxO has chosen to abandon Legacy. Otherwise, it’s up to the user to decide whether or not Wide Gamut has anything to offer. For me it hasn’t, but DxO is happy to force users like me to adapt rather than spend time on maintaining existing features like Legacy and PRIME. I’ve done so by abandoning PhotoLab, since I don’t really expect DxO will change.

Still a nice editor, but too much breakage from release to release for me, and not irreplaceable. There are better things to spend time on than adapting to random changes in PhotoLab.

17

I meant more capable as in capable of representing more colours.

It’s what they call progress. I get that it seems easy to just leave them in there, but any time they touch any tool in PhotoLab, they would have to make sure it works with both colour models. Not as much of a drama for PRIME, but honestly, I’ve personally not found any case where PRIME is not bettered by a later version. Does it have a different “character”? Sure, but the goal is to eliminate noise without eliminating detail. DeepPRIME does that better. There are other options if you have different goals.

And here you are … holding them to account?

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18

If they had made it seamless to switch - change the colour space and your image is otherwise unchanged - then there wouldn’t be a problem, but this is just another case of dumping the work onto the user. I’m not keen on having to redo every image I might want to revisit should DxO remove the possibility of editing in Legacy at all in the future, or because other features no longer work with Legacy, or to workaround the current problem of PhotoLibrary no longer showing me accurate colours for Legacy images on Windows.

Sure, easier for them, more work for users. It’s a choice: either they’re just interested in the latest and let users adapt to changes as required, or they put in more effort into ensuring that user’s aren’t affected. Obviously DxO has chosen the former, but not all software developers make this choice.

Capture One has been much more stable in my experience (up to v22): they version their “rendering engine”, similar to Lightroom (which I haven’t used since v6), I’ve had no problems with rendering changing over time. Darktable versions its modules, so that and what I’ve read about its backwards compatibility gives me hope. PhotoLab has always just been best effort, and DxO is clearly not too bothered about some breakage now and again.

I can’t say I’ve found many images, but have have found a few where it doesn’t require pixel-peeping to see the difference, and where no amount of fine-tuning has changed it. The problem is just that I have over 1700 images where I’ve used PRIME since PL1, and going through these to see what more surprises I might find is another thing I’m not keen on.

I expect any editor worth its salt to open previous work in the same state I left it. PhotoLab has shown itself to fail on the that point, and after 8 releases I’ve just decided to cut my losses. I’m not happy with discovering that images have changed since I opened them last, or being forced to update edits whenever DxO doesn’t want to maintain an existing feature anymore.

It sort of makes non-destructive a non-feature to me if it doesn’t hold over time, and I don’t really find that PhotoLab offers anything unique unless you engage in the pixel-peeping that I usually don’t. For me, stability is more important than an nth iteration of DeepPRIME that offers little or no practical advantage.

If you just do export and forget then none of this matters, but it does to me.

In the only way I can as a consumer: either a company offers me a product that I feel is enough for the price paid, or I take my money elsewhere.

19

I know this can probably be misinterpreted, but my point is just that saving edits in dop instead of just baking them into exports isn’t a huge advantage if the interpretation of the sidecars changes over time, resulting in changed rendering.

20

@asvensson

Do you expect music publishers to keep stamping out Perry Como on 78s, or Rolling Stones on LPs, or dead-heads for Grateful Dead on reel-reel tapes? How about 8-track, cassette, CDs, the original iPods, and Blackberry phones?
Do you expect Apple, MS, or even IBM to keep all their old formats "current?
Do you expect TV broadcasters to still broadcast in the old analog formats?
Can you purchase an auto with a carburetor, crank windows, and analog AM radio these days? Technology changes and at some point we, the users, must take responsibility if we want to hold onto a specific path.

I support DxOs choice to remove older “technology” so as to keep a cleaner UI as compared to some other image editing software.

I keep raw images on the odd chance I want to re-process, I also have the exported versions that represent my effort at the time. Also, many users keep old versions of software for fallback options such as this.