[Digikam-users] Canon Color profile testing

[Daniel Bauer]

Hello everybody

experimenting with colors... I have tested many different profiles, but I am 
still not happy with the results I get.

As much as I can see there are two possibilities:
1) the Canon camera profiles we have are not really usable, or
2) I am just too stupid to achieve good results.

I hope it's no. 1 :-)

I guess Canon camersas are quite widely used. So if you are interested in 
doing some tests, I have a sample picture* for you on my server:

- the unchanged original picture from camera Canon EOS 20D:
http://www.daniel-bauer.com/test/IMG_0048.CR2 (7.1 MB) 

- the 16-bit tiff, the same picture converted to "wide gamut" with embeded 
profile, made with Canon Digital Photo Professional on Win98. No corrections 
have been applied:
http://www.daniel-bauer.com/test/IMG_0048.TIF (46.9 MB) 

- the 16-bit tiff  converted from wide-gamut-tiff to Adobe-SRGB-Tiff with 
photoshop. This "final" version is as the picture should be in the end:
http://www.daniel-bauer.com/test/IMG_0048_photoshop.tif (46.8 MB)

Using digiKam to convert the wide-gamut-tiff to adobe-srg-tiff works perfect, 
gives quite the same result as photoshop.

But the most important first step: converting from Original CR2 to wide-gamut 
(or directly to SRGB) just doesn't give any good results with digiKam, no 
matter how I try. I think this is because we don't have really good profiles 
for Canon???

Of course one can play and correct the picture, but for daily work this isn't 
really usable. As most of my photos are exposed correct the "developping" 
program should be able to convert those pictures without applying manual 
corrections. As you can see the "developped" file is also quite similar to 
the embedded thumbnail. 

What can we do? How can we get good profiles? Can one contact Canon? Has 
anyone contacted them yet? Is it possible to extract or "hack" the profile 
the Canon Program uses somehow? I know from earlier discussions that the 
original Canon profiles miss something. Isn't it possible to add this missing 
part somehow? Or to make a "whats needed"-sheet to give to Canon for their 
developpers?

Are there many Canon users here, so we could say: "hey we are Millions and we 
are all gonna buy Fuji if you dont come over with your profiles"? :-)) 

Any ideas?

Daniel

* Copyright note: You can use this picture for any private use, but please do 
not publish it or use it in any commercial way. Thank you. 
-- 
Daniel Bauer photographer Basel Switzerland
professional photography: http://www.daniel-bauer.com
Madagascar special: http://www.sanic.ch