On the default rendering, Vivid added 22 % more chroma than the rendering
itself, and Punch 5 % — less than the photographer's earlier exports show
with no look applied (14 % over ours) and well below their everyday look
(27 %). Each preset's colour values (vibrance, saturation, the mixer's
saturation bands) are now scaled together, tone values untouched and
negative ones — Vivid portrait's skin protection — left as written, until
the preset measures: Vivid and Vivid warm 1.30, Vivid landscape 1.38, Vivid,
strong 1.45, Vivid portrait 1.15, Punch 1.12. Measured as mean CIELAB chroma
over 30 raws from the library, as a ratio to the default rendering.
The view transform's second curve is the DNG SDK's published reference
rendering — the ACR3 default curve applied by RefBaselineRGBTone — so
it is the "DNG Reference" curve in the panel, D21 and the code, not a
name borrowed from another product. Comments and docs that justified a
choice by another editor doing it ("as their Amount", "so a
photographer arriving from it finds the name") now give the actual
reason. The Vivid presets no longer describe themselves as reaching
for another editor's look; they are DarkRoom's own.
Factual mentions stay: which program wrote the library's DNGs, what
was measured against, and preset import. camera-profiles.md gains §15,
on starting a photograph from the edit it already carries.
Measured after building them, on four of the library's 6D DNGs: Adobe
Standard's tables lower mean saturation by 3-9 % at defaults, and the
look at 200 % lowers it further. The 6D's look table scales saturation
by 0.925 in its darkest value rows; it was tuned to sit under Camera
Raw's default RGB tone curve, which DarkRoom does not apply, and the
dark-tone desaturation is what is left without it. On _MG_9080 the
Lightroom preview measures 0.49, the matrix alone 0.38, the profile
0.35.
So the spec's "that gap is most of why the same file looks flatter"
was wrong: the gap is tone. The tables stay — they put each hue where
Adobe put it — and the spec, D20 and the Vivid file now say so.
"Stronger camera look" is removed: a stronger Adobe Standard look is a
less saturated picture, the opposite of its name. The Vivid presets,
measured at 0.40-0.46 on the same frame, are what answers "more
colourful" today.
Five looks for "more colourful than the default": Vivid, Vivid strong,
Vivid landscape, Vivid warm and Vivid portrait. They lean on vibrance,
which lifts muted colours most and holds skin back, and use saturation
sparingly on top; landscape and portrait work the colour mixer's bands
so foliage and sky get richer while skin does not. A sixth, Stronger
camera look, pushes the camera profile's look table to 175 %, about the
step from Adobe Standard to Adobe Vivid, and only moves vibrance where
a photograph has no profile.
All change only what they name, so they keep a corrected exposure or
white balance, and the shipped-preset tests bound every key and value.
dtourolle