Sunset RAW Problem

I took a sunset picture with the K3 yesterday, jpg and DNG files as usual. In the jpg from camera, the sun is yellow with paler bands. Processing the DNG with various programs gives the following colour for the sun (default parameters throughout):
- Ricoh/Pentax DCU 5 : white, hint of yellow bands
- Affinity Photo: white
- RawTherapee : yellow, hint of white bands
Photos below.

I fully understand that different processing engines will give different results. However, I've tried to create a yellow sun with Affinity Photo (my default processor) but failed miserably. DCU 5 is a surprise, it's the first time (for me) it hasn't reproduced the jpg output from the camera.

Any idea what might be going on?

1. jpg from camera



2. DCU 5



3. Affinity Photo



4. RawTherapee



Steve

I'm not sure I have any answers, but just need to clarify one thing.... When you say you processed the image using the various RAW programmes, do I take it that you made no actual adjustments?

Correct. Loaded the DNG file and that's what I saw. Output immediately as jpg. All playing around with Affinity Photo (the one I'm most familiar with now) was after the jpg was created.

Steve

It does strike me that if the JPEG capture is what you are trying to emulate, then why not just shoot in JPEG and get that without any further effort being needed? If you want a warmer/cooler tone then that can be done via WB settings. There are also lots of digital effects available.

The only difference is that you would need to choose what look you are seeking up-front and not afterwards. Although quite a range of adjustment is still possible with an in-camera JPEG. It can even be opended in a RAW converter if that helps.

That is, of course, an option. However, DNG is my usual route and it's become a habit (perhaps a bad one!) to work from DNG rather than JPEG. The white/yellow sun issue is a matter of trying to understand what's going on rather than trying to emulate the JPEG. I don't like software producing output that I don't expect (perhaps because a large part of my career has involved software with safety implications if it doesn't behave as expected...).

Steve

I'm assuming that what your eues saw is not being reproduced by the software. This is true of film as well in that different films would show colour differently. I think the answer is that you need to be able to adjust the images so that they appear as you wish them to appear. Different software is clearly producing different results, although no doubt all of them could be adjusted appropriately.

One thought is AWB though. For a sunset I would use Daylight setting and then all the warm colours would remain warm. otherwise, the camera will try to correct them in AWB and produce an overall average grey, making the sun the wrong colour as perceived.

Yes, and I'd check that the software WB is set to "as shot"

Thanks, both.

Interesting suggestion, I'll check. The camera was (and always is) set to daylight WB. If I decide later to change the WB, it's done during RAW processing.

Steve

The point of using raw is that you need to use the sliders to adjust WB/exposure/colour etc to give you the result you want. Outputting immediately to jpeg is not an option unless you have set up the converters defaults to a preset you like, and indeed adjusting them for the individual picture.

"As shot" should give the same colour temperature as the camera jpeg, as that is based on the camera WB setting.

Another thing to check is the software's highlight correction settings.... These can be both user adjusted but also part of the default file opening actions. Some programmes have sophisticated highlight corrections that include saturation tweaks as part of the algorithm, and this can have the effect of changing the apparent colour of highlights, such as your sun.

Also you might have different colour profiles for each program.

I know from experience that Lightroom uses Adobe Standard which looks very different to the Pentax colour profiles available. The blue and violet shades are definitely very different. Maybe your program's colour profiles interpret the yellows differently.

Thanks folks, back from the dog walk and just read your thoughts/suggestions. I'll try them tomorrow, too late to do anything intellectually challenging this evening.

Steve

As others have said, jpg is a processed raw - meaning it's had some manipulations done, in this case by the processor in camera.
There's no such thing as 'straight out of camera' really, as you're still using the camera settings (that you can influence) to process the raw into a jpg.

Raw is well pretty raw, so you'll need to adjust it as you would like to. There's no reason a raw file should necessarily load like a jpg file. Colour temp is one of the points of raw, as nothing is baked in like a processed jpg, and you have the ability to adjust as you like before processing to a jpg.

Yep, understood and agreed.

What surprised me is the big differences for the sun. And that DCU 5 was so far from the camera jpg, which is the first time that's happened for me (or perhaps I've not noticed it before or just been lucky!). I've always understood that Ricoh/Pentax intended DCU 5 to simulate in-camera processing as a starting point i.e. by default it gets the camera settings from the raw file and applies them, you can then change them if you wish.

Incidentally, it's worth adding that the jpg images posted above are a good likeness of what I saw on the screen before saving to jpg. The different suns are therefore not an artefact of jpeg compression.

Some experimenting to be done today... looks like it's going to be too hot to do anything in the garden.

Steve