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This has nothing to do with the "camera maker's JPEG engine." The RAW file actually contains the camera's settings at the time of shooting, in other software th

This has nothing to do with the "camera maker's JPEG engine." The RAW file actually contains the camera's settings at the time of shooting, in other software they can re-use those settings to generate something very similar to the embedded JPEG because they're both set up the same. Both Lightroom and Photo Lab do exactly this. If Darktable cannot support reading that information and importing it as a preset, that's fine, but pretending it is an artist choice seems to misunderstand what is going on here. To get specific Picture Control settings (e.g. sharpness, contrast, saturation, hue, etc), High ISO noise reduction, White balance, and color space are typically important as defaults or presets.

mikae1 4y ago
> This has nothing to do with the "camera maker's JPEG engine." The RAW file actually contains the camera's settings at the time of shooting, in other software they can re-use those settings to generate something very similar to the embedded JPEG because they're both set up the same. You are right, but I'm very sorry to say that attempting to faithfully recreate the look of the manufacturers JPEGs will likely never be the goal of darktable (or any serious photographer for that matter). What happens when you buy a camera from a different brand? You will likely want to normalize the output between your cameras and not to have every other picture rendered with Canon's interpretation of the the scene and the rest with Nikon's.
- deanc 4y ago
  Simply not true. That’s exactly what I want and DT already has a reset button by which I can undo those base edits anyway. It’s again, another thing that puts people off and is confusing as hell at first.
  - mikae1 4y ago
    > Simply not true. Sorry, I don't understand. What is “simply not true”?
- franga2000 4y ago
  It doesn't have to be "faithful" and I agree it's not most people's "goal", but here's why I still want it and appreciate that Lightroom does it very well: - I've been shooting mirrorless, and consequently using EVFs, since the NEX 6 came out. When I take a photo, I have already seen it. I have a vague idea of what tweaks I want to make, so having to start from scratch just interrupts that. Of course, sometimes those tweaks will override basically every default setting, but that doesn't mean having them wasn't valuable - I often shoot RAW not because I want to painstakingly develop each photo to perfection, but because I simply need more latitude to "fix things in post". Especially when shooting events in suboptimal lighting or when I need to raise the ISO to make sure a critical event gets captured.
  - auxym 4y ago
    FWIW I agree with you, but DT devs don't, which is their right to put in their free time to develop their software according to their own preferences.
    - franga2000 4y ago
      Of course! I wasn't trying to suggest otherwise. But these kinds of discussions are still important because if enough of us got together we could start a community initiative to develop this and either get it merged or maintain a live fork with these features.
auxym 4y ago
It's not a simple case of reading data from the raw though. Out of those you listed, yes, white balance can be trivially read from the metadata and applied to the processing automatically, and in fact DT does do exactly that. "Color space", by which I assume you mean input color profile aka the color matrix of the camera's sensor, has to be calibrated or reverse engineered by shooting standardized color targets under standard illuminants. DT does have this data and applies it automatically, but the calibration is provided by users and might not be ideal. You would probably get better results by doing your own calibration, but that is somewhat involved. Picture control things like saturation etc that you select in camera are post processing steps that the camera applies to the raw in order to get a "developed" jpeg. They are proprietary to the camera maker and not published. Even if you can read settings like "saturation" and "portrait mode" from the metadata, you don't know which algorithm exactly that implies. Lightroom and other commercial software works with camera makers under NDA in order to reproduce the camera's processing. Could it be reverse engineered by open source software? Maybe, but the DT devs decided that they prefer to go in another direction.

mikae1 4y ago

> This has nothing to do with the "camera maker's JPEG engine." The RAW file actually contains the camera's settings at the time of shooting, in other software they can re-use those settings to generate something very similar to the embedded JPEG because they're both set up the same. You are right, but I'm very sorry to say that attempting to faithfully recreate the look of the manufacturers JPEGs will likely never be the goal of darktable (or any serious photographer for that matter). What happens when you buy a camera from a different brand? You will likely want to normalize the output between your cameras and not to have every other picture rendered with Canon's interpretation of the the scene and the rest with Nikon's.

deanc 4y ago
Simply not true. That’s exactly what I want and DT already has a reset button by which I can undo those base edits anyway. It’s again, another thing that puts people off and is confusing as hell at first.
- mikae1 4y ago
  > Simply not true. Sorry, I don't understand. What is “simply not true”?
franga2000 4y ago
It doesn't have to be "faithful" and I agree it's not most people's "goal", but here's why I still want it and appreciate that Lightroom does it very well: - I've been shooting mirrorless, and consequently using EVFs, since the NEX 6 came out. When I take a photo, I have already seen it. I have a vague idea of what tweaks I want to make, so having to start from scratch just interrupts that. Of course, sometimes those tweaks will override basically every default setting, but that doesn't mean having them wasn't valuable - I often shoot RAW not because I want to painstakingly develop each photo to perfection, but because I simply need more latitude to "fix things in post". Especially when shooting events in suboptimal lighting or when I need to raise the ISO to make sure a critical event gets captured.
- auxym 4y ago
  FWIW I agree with you, but DT devs don't, which is their right to put in their free time to develop their software according to their own preferences.
  - franga2000 4y ago
    Of course! I wasn't trying to suggest otherwise. But these kinds of discussions are still important because if enough of us got together we could start a community initiative to develop this and either get it merged or maintain a live fork with these features.

auxym 4y ago

It's not a simple case of reading data from the raw though. Out of those you listed, yes, white balance can be trivially read from the metadata and applied to the processing automatically, and in fact DT does do exactly that. "Color space", by which I assume you mean input color profile aka the color matrix of the camera's sensor, has to be calibrated or reverse engineered by shooting standardized color targets under standard illuminants. DT does have this data and applies it automatically, but the calibration is provided by users and might not be ideal. You would probably get better results by doing your own calibration, but that is somewhat involved. Picture control things like saturation etc that you select in camera are post processing steps that the camera applies to the raw in order to get a "developed" jpeg. They are proprietary to the camera maker and not published. Even if you can read settings like "saturation" and "portrait mode" from the metadata, you don't know which algorithm exactly that implies. Lightroom and other commercial software works with camera makers under NDA in order to reproduce the camera's processing. Could it be reverse engineered by open source software? Maybe, but the DT devs decided that they prefer to go in another direction.