Picture Style Editors - Alternatives?

Started by ItsMeLenny, November 25, 2013, 04:49:35 AM

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ItsMeLenny

Are there any alternatives to Canons Picture Style Editor?

Does anybody have their own technique?

Andy600

Do you want to make/edit one for video or stills?

I believe Matlab is the only other option but it's expensive and complex.

If you want to apply a custom PS to raw images in post you could try Adobe's DCP editor.
Colorist working with Davinci Resolve, Baselight, Nuke, After Effects & Premier Pro. Occasional Sunday afternoon DOP. Developer of Cinelog-C Colorspace Management and LUTs - www.cinelogdcp.com

ItsMeLenny

I'm on linux. So that rules Adobe out. :P

But actually I want to create one for video. I've looked through many many and none just don't quite make it for me.

My brother I think has matlab as he is a maths boy. I have scilab installed.
How does one create a picture style using it?

Andy600

I can't really offer any help with Matlab as I don't have it. Sorry.
Colorist working with Davinci Resolve, Baselight, Nuke, After Effects & Premier Pro. Occasional Sunday afternoon DOP. Developer of Cinelog-C Colorspace Management and LUTs - www.cinelogdcp.com

ItsMeLenny

Lol. But then how do you know Matlab can create picture styles for Canon cameras? :P

Andy600

Because I was making Pic Styles and did a lot of research. It's (apparently) how certain PS authors can legitimately sell picture styles for Canon cameras without breaking the law. You can't sell PicStyles if they are made with Canon PSE.
Colorist working with Davinci Resolve, Baselight, Nuke, After Effects & Premier Pro. Occasional Sunday afternoon DOP. Developer of Cinelog-C Colorspace Management and LUTs - www.cinelogdcp.com

apefos

Andy, you can ask for a donation for your picture style, no problem. And it would be great for all of us if you allow us to donate and download it! I saw your videos on vimeo and they are great!

The websites which offer Picture Styles don't sell, they ask for donations, like Magic Lantern does. And they use the Canon Picture Style Editor. See this text from the Lightform disclaimer:

"The Lightform Picture Style and the Cinema Picture Style is a file generated by the official Canon Picture Style Editor."
This text is here: http://www.cineplus.ch/disclaimerc5d.html

The Magic Lantern developers and the Picture Style Creators are doing great work for us, they deserve the donations, as you also deserve for your picture style.

The Canon Picture Style Editor User Agreement License does not talk about selling prohibition, see the license:

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Andy600

You say tomato I say tomato  ;D

Thanks, glad you like them. I did actually release the Super series (Neutral, Faithful, Portrait etc) a while ago but my website is no longer active so they are not currently available. I need to get a new blog up and I'll make the Picstyles, LUTs, Raw Guide and other things I've created freely available to download with an option to donate.

A 'donation' is one thing but a fixed donation, using a Paypal buy button and no way to receive the product without donating? That is without a doubt a sale and breaks the Canon TOS. I read a more detailed TOS somewhere that expressly forbids anyone from selling them but I haven't heard of anyone being sued by Canon lol.

Colorist working with Davinci Resolve, Baselight, Nuke, After Effects & Premier Pro. Occasional Sunday afternoon DOP. Developer of Cinelog-C Colorspace Management and LUTs - www.cinelogdcp.com

ItsMeLenny

Do you have any links for making pic styles in Matlab.

Also what are these ones that you've made, I haven't heard of them, I am interested!

Andy600

No, sorry. I don't think there are any. I only know about Matlab from other PS developers.

I made a set of flat PicStyles similar to Cinestyle but using the full 8-bit luma range (Cinestyle is truncated to RGB16-232). They are based on the main Canon PicStyles plus the additional portrait looks that Canon offer.

TBH I haven't done any more work with PS since raw came along but there are a couple of videos on my Vimeo channel https://vimeo.com/andy600 that show what SuperNeutral looks like when converted back to Rec709 (I made LUTs for each style). There are slight gains in highlight detail over Cinestyle but with H.264 being a compressed 8-bit codec any flat PicStyle will mean video is more susceptible to gradient banding.

There are plenty of good PicStyles out there but IMO Canon's latest free one 'Video-x' is one of the best looking. I find if you knock the contrast down and have sharpness at +1 or +2 you can get some great results and still have a little wiggle room when grading .... but raw has kind of spoiled my view now :D

Colorist working with Davinci Resolve, Baselight, Nuke, After Effects & Premier Pro. Occasional Sunday afternoon DOP. Developer of Cinelog-C Colorspace Management and LUTs - www.cinelogdcp.com

ItsMeLenny

Yeah, raw is fair enough. It's a little small on the 550D though.

I did use Video-X for a video I made. And I'm somewhat satisfied. Yet at the same time not quite.

Yeah I notice cinestyle does that, like rec.601 kind of standards.

Your ones look pretty good. I'd like to check them out. But still, I'd like to work out how to make my own :P

Andy600

I'll send you them when I can find them ;)

The Canon app is a pain in the a** but I suggest you spend a few hours playing with it to get a feel for how the curve control points work. The 6 color-axes wheel in the latest PSE is useful for adjusting primaries but use the specific color tab for skin tones. Most of the commercial PicStyles out there tend to focus on smoothing skin tones by equalizing the skin tone range but it can make skin look very plasticy. I tended to leave skin alone and let the base PS (Faithful or Portrait) do it's thing. I then adjust the hues of other colours, taking care not to affect skin at all. Make sure not to overlap color selections and make only minor adjustments. Don't forget, although the luma curve appears to be linear it's not. There is already an s-curve for the base picture style that you are counteracting when you change things so it's never gonna be scientific. I keep contrast and saturation centered as it gives you options to reduce/increase the settings when you have made the PS.

If only it would let you save the curves and color adjustments separately :(
Colorist working with Davinci Resolve, Baselight, Nuke, After Effects & Premier Pro. Occasional Sunday afternoon DOP. Developer of Cinelog-C Colorspace Management and LUTs - www.cinelogdcp.com

a1ex

Here's a quick and dirty test image that may help you reverse the curves from Canon picture styles: gradient.cr2

(specs: vertical bars of constant "hue" in raw, green from 0 to -12 EV, red at -3 ... +3 EV relative to green, blue at -3 ... +3 EV relative to green, Faithful picture style, more details in EXIF, be sure to extract the embedded JPEG and compare it with the raw data)

I came up with this during a long train ride, in an attempt to fix the dual ISO preview images in a less aggressive way. I'll try to publish the code and some findings in the near future.

After this quick analysis, I became interested in a picture style that preserves hue properly (so, if the color ratios in raw are constant, the hue in the jpeg output should be constant too, regardless of brightness). This doesn't seem true with built-in picture styles, but dcraw gets pretty close if you increase the saturation level a little. That's worth keeping in mind when shooting bright red subjects that turn yellow or pink if you increase the brightness.

I'm curious how Lightroom renders this test image, can you try it and upload a JPEG?

Greg

Quote from: a1ex on November 25, 2013, 02:44:06 PM
I'm curious how Lightroom renders this test image, can you try it and upload a JPEG?

ACR 8.3 beta :

Andy600

I don't have Lightroom unfortunately and only have the Canon PSE editor which doesn't have separate RGB curves and is rudimentary at best. I suspect you would need a fully calibrated reference monitor too. Maybe this image could be useful for the Visioncolor guys!? I think they work with Matlab for PS development.
Colorist working with Davinci Resolve, Baselight, Nuke, After Effects & Premier Pro. Occasional Sunday afternoon DOP. Developer of Cinelog-C Colorspace Management and LUTs - www.cinelogdcp.com

apefos

@A1ex

When you talked in the other topic about this issue I think I did not understand well, but now I am starting to understand what are you after. It seems you want to find a way to see real colors in camera LCD when shooting raw instead of seeing the wrong colors. When we was talking in the other topic you said this:

I'm interested in this for in-camera preview (not final output), but I'm having big trouble with color casts caused by demosaicing. Just compare the two sub-images at low ISO and the two sub-images at high ISO (they have very different hues). I'm not sure how to solve it.

When we open the raw video files in computer in ACR it looks like very wrong colors, so we need to correct colors to get a useful image. In camera, the LCD shows similar wrong colors when recording raw.

Is this what you want to solve?
1-to get a great color preview in camera LCD when doing the raw recording? (without dual iso)
2-to solve the hue difference in dual iso raw video between low and high iso? in preview?, in recorded dual iso raw video? or in both preview and recorded?

how do you perceive the hue difference in the two isos in dual iso recording?
is it more red or magenta in low iso and more green in high iso as I said in the other topic or is it a different thing?

how a picture style can help you to achieve your goals?
what a picture style can do for raw recording and also for dual iso raw recording?

I would like to understand better, maybe I can help someway...

apefos

I just played some minutes with my 600D T3i here and I think I understood what you need.

when you enable raw recording, the preview shows correct color, but when you enable dual iso, the colors get a magenta cast. and the amount of magenta increases when you increase the fstops iso difference in dual iso module.

I did a manual  white balance in a white paper under a fluorescent light instaled behind a glass in the ceiling. The ML white balance gaves me 3300K and magenta 8

so I enabled dual iso and all colors got a magenta cast, so I decreased the magenta to 0 in the white balance and the preview becames ok (this was to 100/3200 iso in dual iso module)

if white balance does not have influence in raw dual iso recording you can use the magenta bias in white balance to get a good preview, no need a picture style for this

but if white balance have influence in dual iso raw colors recording, you cannot change the magenta bias, so the picture style will do the correction for  preview in dual iso.

what you need to do in the picture style editor is to set the hue towards green for all the colors in the second panel, the amount I do not know, needs tests. Problem is you will need 5 picture styles, one for each iso difference combination, because as iso difference increase, magenta cast increases also. So using the magenta bias in the white balance to correct the preview colors is much easy to do.

I will do tests to perceive if the magenta bias or a picture style can correct the dual iso magenta cast for dual iso h264, if yes there is no need to change the algorithm I built. If the magenta bias cannot correct the dual iso h264 recording I will need to correct the color cast in the reconstructed lines, it seems I will need to experiment to perceive if the amount of magenta cast introduced by the dual iso module is the same for both isos, if yes the magenta bias in camera can do the job, if not, the colors in the lines will be different and i will need to do the calculations to get the formulas for each line inside the wave, and implement the formulas in the algorithm...

just another challenge...

ItsMeLenny

As a1ex kind of pointed out, this is still my attempt to reverse canons base curve.

And also, that's another thing with video-x, it actually boosts some colours and not others.

I'm unsure how the gradient thing works. Or is it to check against picture styles.

apefos

I did some tests with the 600D in dual iso and I found there is a diference in white balance and in the hue between the two isos.

The diference in white balance is biger than in the hue.

It is possible to measure the amount for both, but it will need a very precise test.

Probably I will do this test because I will need it to rewrite the dual iso h624 algorithm to include color correction.

For dual iso raw preview in camera a simple way is to use the two bias, amber/blue and magenta/green or use the RGB multipliers like this
R= 1.084
G=0.500
B=1.084

some settings in multipliers and amber/blue and magenta/green will be enough and better than develop a picture style for this.

if the multipliers ruins the recording, just use the bias

the difference between two isos must be corrected in the post processing, when extracting in computer, in cr2hdr

ItsMeLenny

The RGB multipliers in camera aren't accurate.

apefos

OK, I will test the multiplyers to perceive this issue.

Important thing is: I found the way to tweak the preview, it needs an adjust in white balance and in hue.

It will need some tests using the color chart to perceive the amount of correction in WB and HUE to give a good preview.

Also, the adjusts will be different for each iso combo: 100/200, 100/400, 100/800, 100/1600, 100/3200

There are some ways to do the adjusts after finding the correct amount: use the ML main WB, use the ML WB Y/B bias and M/G bias, use the RGB multiplyers, use a custom picture style. I will perceive which method will be more precise and more practical/easy for using.

These tests will also help me to improve the DeWaving algorithm for dual iso H264 video, implementing WB and HUE correction in the Algorithm.

Please be patience because I have job to do so I will perform the tests in a couple of hours after evening in each day. I do not know how many days I will need, so please wait.

ItsMeLenny

I wonder if this is due to the bayer pattern. Twice as many green pixels, so the green multiplies logarithmically faster than the red and blue when using higher isos.

apefos

I will pay attention to that.

I am having a problem. My 600D is overheating with the last nightly build, and with previous nightly builds I get lots of erros when loading the modules. So I need to shut down the camera many times to wait it cool down and it is annoying and makes me lose time.

The best stable build I found is the "NewMem" build from 1%. It has the dual iso module, but the dual iso module enabled for h264 recording that I have is from other build and does not work with it. And I need to record in h264 to perceive the wb and hue differences doing analysis in the computer.

So, to go further in the tests, I need a small favor. Please enable dual iso h264 recording in the dual iso module from the newmem build. You can download the module separately from this link (I renamed it to know it is the correct module), and please allow me to download it when enabled for h264 recording.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/8rcdanbi5fvvr1o/dual_iso_newmem.mo

thanks!

apefos

@A1ex

I would like to say sorry due to I did not understand the problem when you posted about it in the other topic.
I found I was to much worried about lines retention in that moment and I did not perceive the color cast problem.
Also I think I was too much focused on my goal to get h264 dual iso working, and I forgot about the main filosofy of Magic Lantern: a colaborative project where everybody helps everybody. So now I believe I am in the correct behavior, developing the h264 dual iso with help from other members and helping other members to improve their developments, like the dual iso raw preview. So the slogan is: "I help you, you help me and we help everybody." Or, as we say here in my country: "One hand washes the other and both wash the face."

@Andy600

I also was thinking about donations, doing some reflections about our talking.

I remember two video tutorials I did on Vimeo teaching people how to do good denoise in video and how to scan super8 films. I got more than 10000 plays in each video, yes, more than 10K plays, and I enabled TipJar on these videos to get donations, but nobody sent... I got just nothing!!! So my conclusion is: free donations does not work so good...

So I think when people ask for a fixed donation, if the amount is low and the product is good quality, I believe it is ok. The problem is to fix a high amount and/or when the product is bad quality, then it is wrong thing to do. Low price and good product is good for both sides.

Now it is time for me to go on doing my job, at night I will restart the tests.

thanks

ItsMeLenny

umm... ... ... ...wtf



ANYWAY


Andy600 if you are still in;

Where abouts did you talk to other people about creating picture styles. I've been googling for hours and finding nothing on Matlab and PSs. And haven't found any IRCs either. So if you have even just the slightest nudge in the right direction it may help me out.