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That is strange - did you make those files by hex edit or through the Canon Picture Style Editor software?

I saved a basic file with no adjustments from Canon Picture Style Editor and made my changes in a hex-editor. It's very strange that my pf3-file works in the 5Ds, but not in the 7D Mark I / 5D Mark III.

I haven't dug all the way in but from what I've seen it's just down to the existence of many more tags available in the pf3 format. For instance, in PSE, the extra Sharpness settings, Tone curve (RGB), and the entire Six-color axes tab are not saved in pf2 format. I believe the minimum size for pf3 comes in around 450kb. For instance, I saved a custom pf3 out of PSE with default settings, and the resulting file had 3D LUTs inside for both sRGB and AdobeRGB that each took up 216kb of data.

Ok, that makes sense, that the pf3-files are much larger than the pf2-files if there are 3d-luts. Do you have more information about the 3d-luts? Do you know the offsets of the two tables and any idea how to use these informations? This would be real cool if we can have customized 3D LUTs out of Photoshop for example. We could nearly reproduce any effect/filter made in Photoshop.

Just a guess: maybe Canon PSE creates a 3D-LUT in the case of the PF3-format out of the seetings made with the Canon Tool and uses this one to make the adjustments in the camera. This would be an explanation why my changes in the PF3-files are ignored in the 7D I and 5D Mark III.

Unfortunately the pf2-format only allows to define 3 channels. But often you want to add another RGB-curve that affects all channels at the same time. For example you want to add some contrast with the help of curves. In Photoshop you usually do this with a s-curve in the "RGB-channel". There are 2 solutions here:

1) Replicate this "RGB-channel" to each channel separately. So 3x the same curve in the red-, green- and blue-channel. This is exactly what the "RGB-channel" does.

2) But sometimes the red-channel has its own curve. Or maybe the green- or blue-channel. So in this case you have to add two curves to "simulate" the non existing rgb-curve in pf2-format. All you have to do is to overlap the control-points of the separate channel and the rgb-channel.

The PF3-format has an adavantage here. There you can define a additional RGB-curve that you can use for this purpose. Although I can create "valid files" that are accepted by EOS Utility and the camera, I can't see the effect of the applied curve (5D Mark III) in the live view/resulting image. If I use the exact same file in Canon Digital Professionel or my other cam EOS 5Ds (s!) it works. This is very strange!

Note: I made a lot of tests and sometimes the curves in Photoshop does not exactly look like the curves in PSE - even if use the exact control points. So I think Canon uses a different interpolation method than Adobe. To fit the curve I sometimes have to add another control points for the exact desired replication of the curves.

Does anyone has some information about the PF3-format and can tell me why these files are so huge compared to a PF2-file?

@agentirons

If you have some time you can update the specification of PF2.

In the "10 18 00 04   RGB Gamma [long]" block you can enter 12 points for each RGB-channel. The channel order is definitely R, G, B. I have tested this and reproduced curves from Photoshop. Works like charme. The values are altered independently of each channel.

Thanks for the stunning progress investigating the file structure of PF2 and PF3! So amazing!

In the excel sheet I recognized a block called "3x20 Matrix sRGB [long]". What can you do with this block? Is it a transformation of RGB-pixel values from one to another value? If so, can someone give me a short example how the transformation is being performed?