I’m curious to see what people tend to prefer here, as I’ve been bouncing between the specific DxO camera profile for my camera (a Canon R6) and having Color Rendering set to “off” and using whatever it is that DxO renders instead.
Curiously, with it “off” I seem to get more a more pleasing overall image exposure and colours than with it on (initially at least, I’ll then have to go on and make extra edits).
Is there any great drawback to using (or not using) this tool? Or is it just a way of telling Photolab to interpret RAW colour data slightly differently and neither is really “better”?
PhotoLab renders colours, no matter what you set as default or change later. You can set any rendering that produces colours you like…and if not activating the colour rendering tool does that, you can relax and start editing or leave things as they are.
Better? Again, whatever makes the image look closest to what you like can be considered best.
Remember, even if we deactivate all tools with e.g the No corrections preset, PhotoLab has to do something about colours and tonality, based on a) the camera’s sensor characteristics and b) what the wizards at DxO think should be done. Use PhotoLab for your own visions, not for someone else’s - unless you work for someone else
@Fineus I use generic renderings, with the default profile, and modify to my taste. My Olympus greens are sometimes way, way off, as others here have noted. I created a preset for this which gets me close.
I too found problems with DxO colours with my Olympus cameras. The greens particularly were garish and too yellow. I could have fiddled with the colour wheel to create my own presets but my colour vision is unreliable on account of an inherited red deficiency.
I found the colour profiles (DCP) from Colour Fidelity were satisfying but they only worked before the introduction of wide gamut in Photolab with which I was getting uncorrectable highlight overexposure.
All became well again when I switched to Adobe DCPs - there are several profiles available for Olympus: normal, vivid, portrait etc. Greens are still better than DXO’s, so good enough for my photography.
Adobe DCPs come for free if you download Adobe DNG Converter (Windows and Mac).
The default profile in PL7 (maybe also PL6, am not sure) is the neutral profile. So if you deactivate the color rendering, it is the same as using the neutral profile, thus there is no disadvantage.
Personally I have troubles with all of the PL profiles for Nikon cameras, the blues are not saturated, skies appear almost white/gray. The Adobe dcp profiles are much better in these cases.
That depends on what the working color space is set to. By detault it will be the DxO Wide Gamut color space. In that case, turning off Color Rendering is the same as using the neutral color profile. With the legacy working color space (which is Adobe RGB), turning off C.R. yields your camera’s default color profile.
The most important point for me, which has not been mentioned yet, is the Intensity slider in the Color Rendering palette. I usually prefer my camera’s default rendering to Neutral, but with Intensity at around 50. I can likewise blend in various film emulations rather than have to go all-in as a starting point for further adjustments. So the title of this topic, option one vs. option two vs. option three, misses how versatile this tool really is. And if you see some colors as too garish, try raising “Protect saturated colors” also.
I use R5 … I also use Adobe’s DCP profiles for R5 which I modify a bit ( for tone curve, etc ) to my purely subjective taste… I create my own DCP camera profiles with dcamprof and Lumariver Profile Designer ( from the same author as dcamprof, just it is a GUI tool and not free ) that again I like subjectively … you can also grab C1 profiles for your camera ( but icc option are available for legacy color space only - not wide gamut - AND - unmodified C1 profiles AS IS need brightness boost to be usable )
in any case unless you are talking about reproduction work (where you can in fact evaluate how close you are to the target dE2K-wise or otherwise) then using whatever profiles is purely subject taste-based thing…
among DxO camera profiles for R5 I like to select Samsung NX1/NX11 profile - specifically when I need less contrast/saturation for a white person skin as a staring point… but again this is just me…
In DxO wide gamut, generic /neutral color, the equivalent Optical Corrections Only, or my own DCPs. The DxO standard preset for my Leica Q is very poor, unless I turn the intensity down to zero!
