SILKYPIX Developer Studio 3

Having heard about SILKYPIX a while ago, I was reminded of them again when Pentax announced their PhotoBrowser now uses the SILKYPIX development engine. So, I had a look at the Developer Studio 2.

Not the easiest interface to get around, but it produced very capable images from the RAW files I have. I was just about to go and buy version 2 when ISL announced version 3 beta English.

Wow! All I can say is - try it! NOW! :-)

Some of the interesting features:

• Can process JPG and TIFF as if they were RAW. Now that's interesting! You can now white balance correct and adjust images from whereever. Fascinating.
• Skin tone white balance. Instead of just a gray colour picker you can select skin tones and it makes a pretty good job of white balancing.
• Colour profiles like you won't believe. There are film-emulsion emulations that will give you eye-popping rich colours, or neutral colours, etc. Thankfully they've also added a couple of simple Monochrome profiles too.
• Colour adjustments and curves. Usual curves facilities (with separate RGB control too), and adjustments within the colour wheel.
• "Tastes". This is probably better named "Styles". You can elect any subset of development parameters and group them into a "Taste" that can be recalled at will. ISL provide some interesting ones - portrait, blue sky, landscape etc. These wrap up the curves, contrast controls, sharpness etc all in one.
• Sharpening - some seriously good sharpening. There are two types "Standard" and "Pure Detail". I have had some truly amazing results out of my 6Mp DSLR (admittedly with expensive lenses).
• Noise reduction - this really does work, and works along with the sharpening very well. Silky smooth skies, skin, and high ISO images are possible.
• Fast interface
• Highlight recovery. From what I can gather you should underexpose the RAW, correct the underexposure with the exposure compensation, and then the highlight recovery will work. (It doesn't do much if you've already blown the CCD out.)
• DNG support.
• Upsizing to 10k pixels wide or high.
• AdobeRGB or sRGB colourspaces (no others)

There are a few little things I'd like changed (like background batch processing and some "Japlish" expressions!), but overall I'm suitably impressed!

Save for Web in Photoshop

This post is an addendum to my previous post about removing the profile from the display adapter.

In short - don't :-)

The reason is this: Photoshop uses the full profile for the display (if it's associated with the adapter) and does its best to get accurate colour. However, when you use "Save for Web", Photoshop turns off this profile-awareness to show you how it will look in the browser.

Now, if the LCD has been calibrated to the sRGB specification, then there will be absolutely no difference between an sRGB image in Photoshop and the Save-For-Web. But, if the LCD is not sRGB - maybe something narrower, or wider in colour gamut - then there will be a difference when you save for web.

If Photoshop has a good profile (say created by a Spyder or Spyder 2), then the image view is the one to go for, and you can trust that. What is viewed on the web is entirely down to the display characteristics - note that even if you have calibrated the monitor you may still see a colour shift as you are displaying in two different gamuts (a bit like when you display an AdobeRGB without a profile on an sRGB display).

For more info, check out the posts here and here. (They may shed a little more light on the subject.)

Some others say that for an accurate Save For Web you should do the following:

• Convert to sRGB
• Save the file (probably as a TIFF)
• Close and reopen the file
• Then use Save For Web.

However, I haven't yet found this necessary. What I do find useful is the soft-proof in Photoshop CS2. So, here is my procedure:

• Flatten the image
• Convert to sRGB
• Use Soft Proof to check at gamma 2.2, Trinitron display (preserve color numbers)
  
• Tweak as needed with curves etc
• Then Save for Web

The gamma 2.2 Trintron display is a reasonable average PC configuration just to get an idea of how it may look on others' computers. It's all guesswork, or course!

Photoshop Tutorials

Stumbled across another Photoshop tutorial site, which has a few nuggets in there:
http://www.radiantvista.com

Add to that one of the sites I visit from time to time:
http://www.retouchpro.com

Plus those at ePhotozine:
http://www.ephotozine.com/techniques/

Spyder profiling

Just while I think about this...
Having upgraded to the Spyder 2 I have now managed to calibrate my LCDs - even a dual LCD on a single XP machine! However, the Toshiba M200 has bitten me again with its horrible video driver.

Once you have calibrated the M200 LCD, you may find that the "Color Management" setting in the display driver has the ICC/ICM profile associated with it. Remove it! Otherwise, Photoshop double corrects so that you can never get accurate colour in both Photoshop and the web. With the advanced colour management panel for the display driver empty (yes, empty!), the problem disappears. Thankfully the Spyder2 still manages to load the profile at bootup so it remains calibrated.

I can't tell you how long it took to find this out....!

Comments and Profiles

Just a few notes:

1. I'm now allowing comments on this blog - so fire away! I'll moderate them first before publishing, but let me know what you think ;-)

2. There's been some progress on the Pentax *ist-D profile front. Hopefully have something to publish in a few weeks.

3. Finally published my capture sharpening method and action. The notes are available here, and the Photoshop action from here. I hope to have some screen-grabs and sample images ready in a week or so, and the whole thing should appear on this site.

Have fun!

Capture One camera profiles

I've been playing around with the QPcard, an Agfa IT-8 target and trying to get some sense from the Pentax *ist-D...

There are some seriously good quality profiles by Magne Nilsen which are available from: RawWorkflow.com. However, it's only for Canons, and a couple of Nikons. The *ist-D just isn't commercially viable :(

On a similar note I've found that the *ist-D (f/w 1.12) doesn't seem to capture manual white balance correctly. I used the Expodisc to set the WB and also capture a grey frame. In Capture One the camera reported 12400/30 (color temp & tint). Measuring off the Expodisc frame yielded 6900/20, and measuring off the QPcard 201 yielded 6600/21. Quite why the *ist-D gives such a strange WB I don't know... but it occurs in Capture One, Adobe Camera Raw (CS2), and Raw Shooter. So I have to assume it is either the camera or the (mis-)interpretation of the data.

And it's definitely not a linear relationship between the correct and manual WB either. Added to that is that manually set WB and JPG in the *ist-D is still just plain wrong. Something's goofed up somewhere, and I'm wondering if it's in the Pentax firmware.

So, I'm not sure whether I should try and profile the *ist-D with the camera WB, or an accurately set WB in Capture One. Am trying to find out some answers...

..tried this again and found the MWB agrees with the Expodisc... could it be that I'm using the Expodisc wrongly, or is there something about the way the *ist-D captures the MWB? (I'm trying to find out!)

White Balance and Colour Correction

I've had an Expodisc (www.expodisc.com) for a few months and absolutely love it. It's been fabulous to get an accurate white balance in even the craziest of lighting circumstances. So now I shoot RAW and use manual white balance - which is really easy on the Pentax *ist-D which has 3 manual settings.

In addition, I decided to get a QPcard 201 (www.qpcard.com) which has some interesting properties. The card itself has colour patches with an even spectrum, thus making it suitable for use under all kinds of lighting conditions (you don't get the metamemerism effect where the perceived colour changes under different lighting conditions). The software they provide allows you to correct the image colour and simulate "Neutral", "Velvia", and "Sinar". Now that's very nice... but my workflow is RAW and their software only works on JPGs. So the hunt is on to create a half decent ICC profile that can be used in Capture One....

Now I have an Agfa IT8 target, a QPcard 201, and the Expodisc I should be able to get a profile created... somehow! (I know there's stuff on www.aim-dtp.net, but I want to create three profiles: neutral, Velvia, and Sinar.) If anyone's got any ideas that don't involve hugely expensive software, do email me (mattmatic at hotmail dot com)!!