The fact that only these two software packages on the market have this tool is quite surprising for me because it is one of the most reliable and easy way to make a split toning colour grading.
yes it’s very similar but different enough to make the workflow a bit more complex, the calibration tool in lightroom basically shifts the primaries, and while doing so it shrinks the colour gamut of the whole image, so that the colours of the image are rescaled into a smaller gamut making the colour grading very easy, since you don’t have to select and shift colour by colour.
in ACR/LR what they technically do is adjusting the matrix part of DCP profile that is applied / or if external DCP profile is missing - for example you removed/hide it so that ACR/LC can’t find what to use for your camera model and so fall back to using code-embedded marix profile - then they do the same for that matrix profile embedded in Adobe’s code / - and that matrix part is responsible for mapping into CIE XYZ color space ( that is where the colors - as coordinates in a proper colors space - first appear ) before any LUTs from DCP profiles will be applied …
The genuine intended use for this functionality is /for example/ when dealing with exotic illumination scenarios ( “bright light sources (especially neon lights, and especially blue/purple lights)” (c) Eric Chan from Adobe Labs ) In such cases, the resulting matrix color transform (pre-LUT) maps to CIE XYZ in a way that later LUTs may struggle to handle overly “saturated” ( in terms where pixel ends up in CIE XYZ color space coordinates wise ) colors. To address this, you can use the calibration panel to desaturate the colors (" try reducing the Red/Green/Blue Saturation sliders in the Camera Calibration panel (not the HSL tab, and not in the Basic panel). This will help to reduce the oversaturation and clipping" (c) Eric Chan from Adobe Labs )
It’s important to note that while some users employ this panel for creative effects, this was not and is not its primary intended purpose.
proper wording is not " shifts the primaries" - used color spaces ( and their primaries ) stay as they are… but mapping to CIE XYZ is adjusted …
and as there is not guarantee that in PL the color transform is done ( when PL is not using DCP profiles ) the same way there is not guarantee that the tools is even possible to have to operate the same way across DCP and DxO’s own profiles ( AND ICC/ICM color profiles, that DxO still supports )… unless you start creating tools with a lot of caveats when they can be applied, etc
raw data has no “colors” until you map that data into a proper color space ( and even then coordinates might end up not being actually colors )
Right, thanks for the thechnical explanation, I found it very informative! I’m only interesred in the creative use of this tool, I know many hobbysts photographers that use it in other software in the same creative way, and they think that the lack of this tool in Dxo is a dealbreaker!