So a kind of reverse of what the Fine Detail profile does? (Which is the Standard hues but with the Neutral/Faithful contrast.) I'll see if I can cook it up. Might be a bit tricky because the Neutral profile is truly unique among all the profiles as its matrix is literally the most basic it can be; out of the entire 3x20 matrix grid, the only values are simply 1 in each of the initial red, green and blue channels, and nothing more. (See way below for an example table.) All the other profiles (update: except Standard, see following edit) have entries in every single position, accurate to six decimal places and don't actually use the tone curve inputs at all. Getting 60 values to work with the hue produced by just 3 might not be possible precisely, but I'll try to get as close as I can.
EDIT: I just checked. I don't think it'll be possible to copy the tone of Standard, and I've hit something very interesting. It seems the Standard and Monochrome profiles do not work the same as other profiles. There's almost nothing in them—the Standard matrix is the same basic one used by Neutral, shown way below—and instead it causes the software or camera to load up some kind of hidden 'default' rendering based on whatever profile is named at the top of the file. If you try to open up Standard you're basically just working with a drop-down list of the camera defaults. These are probably tailor-made for each camera model, compensating for the different sensitivity of different sensor models. This does not happen for other profiles; the drop-down list and named profile are ignored if anything other than Standard or BW (Monochrome) are chosen.
For example, if I change Standard's listed profile to Landscape, using that new profile just looks 100% like the Landscape profile even though I didn't touch the the matrix or curves; the look of Standard has been lost entirely. If I load up that new profile the matrix still is untouched, even though it's now producing the Landscape colour. But if I do the opposite, changing the Landscape profile's setting to Standard, it continues looking like Landscape and never gains the look of Standard.
In other words, Standard doesn't exist like the other profiles do. Standard is some kind of real firmware-level default, not something we can inspect.
Monochrome is the same deal, there's no way to extract it and it only exists in the same drop-down menu as Standard. Strangely, though selecting Standard in other profiles does
not turn them into Standard, choosing 'BW'
does turn any other profile into Monochrome but without any of the Monochrome-specific controls.
I expect there are many values still hidden to us that are controlling these things. I shall try to cook up a version of Neutral with contrast similar to Standard for you, but it looks like being able to copy Standard's contrast 1:1 is off the table.
Funnily enough it's those sorts of 'simple' adjustments that are turning out to be the hardest.
In the last month I've been messing with the matrix a lot, trying to 'decode' what each entry point refers to (given the matrix isn't labelled and the limited Japanese documentation with the software seems to only refer to the standard version of PSE), and I've found some ways NakedPSE can push beyond what regular PSE offers in order to create a variety of effects; some very useful, some... not so much.
Effects I've got mostly nailed now include negative/inverted colour and exposure, selective colour, single- and two-tone colourisation (separate from split toning), and posterisation. I've also mostly copied over Fujifilm's 'Classic Chrome' profile (about 90% accurate, stills needs some tweaking) and I'm going to start working on their 'Classic Negative'. (I did start copying Astia and Pro Neg S as well, but it turned out those were already 99% like Canon's own Portrait and Faithful profiles, so there wasn't much point bothering.)
... Then there's
this thing, which I'm tentatively naming 'in-camera LSD'. That's what happens when you use NakedPSE to push regular PSE's 'specific colour' tool beyond its normal 30-180° limitations... in this case, typing in a hue range of 6000° and a hue shift of 4000°. Totally useless, but quite amusing to see working in live view/video and it goes to show just how free our in-camera colour choices are now. That one was an accident of mucking about, but I am now trying to work on a profile that keeps that has that sky gradient on purpose, without affecting the rest of the image. Just thought it'd be fun to have rainbow-coloured skies. Probably won't work, but we'll see.
Anyhoo, some more practical things I've picked up:
The Fine Detail profile that Canon added with the 5DS and the introduction of the .pf3 format can be converted to .pf2 and works perfectly fine in older cameras. There's nothing in its colour or contrast that the older cameras can't do. The only thing is you do of course lose the improved sharpening controls (old cameras still only get the one sharpening control, not the strength, fineness and threshold controls of newer cameras), but that's to be expected as that's not a system that is saved in any of the colour profiles. Or, in other words, Canon claiming Fine Detail was only made possible by the new tech and limiting it to .pf3 was always a lie. It's just a 3x20 matrix, same as all the others.
Canon's Video-X profile is the only one of Canon's own profiles that uses a non-linear RGB curve. The Video-X's curve lifts the shadows quite a lot and very slightly lowers mid tones. In fact Video-X is the only Canon profile that touches the curve inputs at all; every other profile simply has the curve set at 0-0, 255-255, with no other points between. The 'LAB' curve (which as noted earlier in this thread doesn't seem to actually be a LAB curve as it uses RGB values and the A and B axis are entirely ignored) is also plain linear in all profiles. (Video-X included.) All the contrast changes between the profiles other than Video-X is done entirely within the 3x20 matrix. Makes you wonder why Canon even bother having the curves at all.
Common wisdom for the last ~12 years, especially for video, is to create a faux-'log' look by selecting the Neutral profile and then setting both Contrast and Saturation to -4. Many books and sites will tell you that even the Neutral profile adds some slight contrast. You may also have heard that the Contrast and Saturation controls are applied before the picture style. Turns out, that's all gibberish. By doing a lot of back-and-forth with different custom matrices and seeing how each control behaves in response, I've deduced that Contrast and Saturation are applied
after the profile's matrix and gamma but
before the specific colour adjustments, then Tone and Sharpening are applied and finally the LAB curve is added. (Yes, after sharpening, bizarrely.) Neutral
doesn't add any contrast to anything, it truly is as pure as a colour profile can be, as I detailed above. So setting Contrast and Saturation to -4 doesn't actually record more detail in anything with the stock profiles; if a stock profile's matrix is going to blow out a colour or crush a shadow, it will have already done so
before those controls are applied. All that is happening with the Contrast control is it's applying a post-matrix, post-gamma brightness curve. Anything it appears to have 'saved' was in fact always there, just perhaps not entirely clear to you. (After all, how many people can tell the difference between a 100% white pixel and a 99% white pixel?) It also does definitively reduce detail as whatever space you make in the highlights and shadows is taken away from the mid tones. The Saturation control works the same way; it can't actually recover anything that has been genuinely blown, it's just enabling you to see more of the nuance in the most saturated parts of the image at the expense of losing nuance in the less-saturated parts.
In practical terms this shouldn't really affect how anyone uses either the Contrast or Saturation controls, or the Neutral profile—after all, as long as your results look good to you that's all that matters—but it does mean anyone who previously said the Contrast control could actually expand dynamic range was simply, categorically wrong. Technically Neutral already has the fullest range possible, and changing Contrast or Saturation is just trading one part of the range for another.
Somewhat related,
a question of my own: A lot of people used to rely on CineStyle, especially with with Contrast and Saturation turned down. That was, for years, 'the' way to film with a 5D2. CineStyle and many premium 'flat' profiles boasted about being able to give you more dynamic range and more colour nuance than any stock profile. Well, here's the CineStyle matrix:
| 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Look familiar? Yup, it's just the Canon Neutral profile. No change to initial recorded colour or contrast. Just like I outlined with the Contrast and Saturation controls, if something was being blown out (either a tone or colour) then that's it gone for good, nothing following it could save it; anything that seems 'saved' by CineStyle would also be equally saved by Neutral. It's not doing anything to save more data than the stock Neutral profile already does.
But what about the gamma curve? That certainly is different, but it's not doing quite what you might expect and this is where I want someone else to weigh in:
0 - 64
128 - 227
256 - 350
384 - 441
512 - 533
640 - 625
768 - 722
896 - 832
1023 - 1023
Given the curves in normal PSE work on just an 8-bit 0-255 scale, and Canon's own profiles all use an 8-bit 0-255 range, that sure is weird. It seems Technicolor found out (or Canon tipped them off) that they didn't have to just stick to the standard scale and used a 10-bit 0-1023 scale, even though 10-bit recording wasn't available at the time the profile was made, and then they... remap 90% of it to fit in a 64-940 video range/reference monitor's range? But then not the very top of the range? It's like they thought they were mixing HDR to SDR... before HDR existed... and thought the black point had to meet video standards but
not the white point. It's
bizarre.
This is, like I said, where I bow out and am asking for someone else to explain this one 'cause it's the one part of all my digging that has me stumped. I have been able to verify with lots of trial-and-error that it's not presenting any more 'recovery' than a simple 8-bit value, low-contrast curve can. It can't be for stills because .jpgs are 8-bit and this profile has no bearing on raw files. I know ML eventually got 10-bit video working on otherwise 8-bit SLRs, but that was well after CineStyle was made and released and neither Technicolor nor Canon would have been working on a profile on the assumption that a third party might make additional software to hack in extra functionality later.
So I just can't get my head around why they plotted the tone curve this way and what they hoped to achieve. Who would be working on an 8-bit system but use 10-bit values? And why would the cameras accept this when they can only apply it to 8-bit files? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
