P: Support for Canon .CR3 Camera-matching Profiles

@andrew_rodney thanks, so just to be clear, there's a way to map the profile created by the color checker's program to a preexisting jpg, right ? It means that using this, we can recreate every camera profile (and not only canon if we have the same scene took by another camera) and share them here. 

It could sound like a solution to the problem of this topic, I imagine ?

The answer is yes as shown earlier. 

I did, yes, and I appreciated it. Still not very clear, I may need something more precise to truly understand what does those terms means. I'll find things to read, you definitely triggered my interest. This said, I would have liked to have an answer to the only question I'm asking from several messages. Could you please consider it ? 

@Etienne_E_Photos I still struggle to understand the true meaning of scene-refered.

Did you read the PDF? It's an entry level, two page piece written by two photographers for other photographers. The one picture kind of sums it up too. 

The answer to your question was provided with examples many pages ago by me; editing a profile. 

@andrew_rodney thanks your your kind explanations. They are quite interesting and I don't have the knowledge to understand every notion you're exposing (I still struggle to understand the true meaning of scene-refered, spectral sensitivity or  Luther-Ives), but I appreciate you're trying to explain your view. 

Nevertheless it doesn't seems to answer my question, which is : can we get canon's colors with a color checker ? If I understood well, maybe, using a canon jpg as a reference. Right ?

@andrew_rodney This is very well stated. I love the proprietary color or Canon jpegs. The issue for me is that for the job that I have and preform in the pro sports space, I can't use the jpeg and have to work from the raw. Often times we have to really pull out shadows for darker skin under a helmet or we have highlights we have to bring back because of drastic change in exposure when the field is half full sun and half shade. During the NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs inside the arenas during watch parties, the color shifts are insanely drastic with every flicker of the big screen that I could only do so much in camera with my WB, and I have to really drastically change the WB in the final edits. I never would have been able to do that in a jpeg. I have to start in the upper left quadrant almost all the way to the top of the grid in the blue/green to balance out how extremely red the light way to get a more natural skin tone. In that instance, I didn't have the option to replicate the exact color as present since my content is made for marketing, I had to get the closet to natural skin tones as possible. My solution right now is to stick with the 1Dx2 as those have available canon camera color matching profiles. I just really wish those would be made available for the newer cameras. Have you ever considered selling profiles you have made for CR3 cameras? I would be very interested in anything you create as its very clear that you are incredibly knowledgable about the intricacies of camera color. 

@andrew_rodney I think this should be pinned to the top of this board because this is incredibly interesting and informative. Thank you for your valuable contribution, advice and explanations.

@Etienne_E_Photos  I know what the topic is. Rikk, The adobe employee monitoring these threads, moved my original post here as he said its the same category. I am here only for advice and to talk about getting good camera profiles for CR3 files or ANY of the Canon cameras that are not currently supported with a Canon Color Matching Profile in Adobe. Whether that means a brilliant engineer or user is able to reverse engineer Canon's profile or someone creates an entirely new version, I would be thrilled to see and read about these topics in relation to camera profiles for the new mirrorless and the 1Dx3.

@Etienne_E_Photos I am super appreciative to any users who can share their expertise and experience here. I did try his suggestions, but unfortunately they just didn't work for me. Im aware that its possible that I am just doing something incorrectly, but anything I have managed to create just doesn't replicate the canon camera matching profiles in my opinion. That's what I am trying to do, as for me, the canon profiles are what I prefer to use in my own workflow as a starting point.

From your point of view, do you consider than a photo developed with a custom ICC made from a color checker will match in terms of colors the same photo processed by canon ?

If your goal is to visually match 24 patches and the profile does that, you got a visual (not necessarily colorimetric) match. 

Now change the scene in any way (Illuminant alone, object), anything that isn't those 24 colors; all bets are off! Some may match, some may not. The mere 24 patches all fall into sRGB gamut expect Cyan! The colors were selected for this task! Read about the target and it's design and evolution:

http://www.babelcolor.com/colorchecker.htm

You really want to understand this based on color science? 

Digital cameras do not have a color gamut (they have a color mixing function). Same with scanners. Only devices, or systems, that render color have a color gamut. 

Basically, a color mixing function is a mathematical representation of a measured color as a function of the three standard monochromatic RGB primaries needed to duplicate a monochromatic observed color at its measured wavelength. Cameras don’t have primaries, they have spectral sensitivities, and the difference is important because a camera can capture all sorts of different primaries. Two different primaries may be captured as the same values by a camera, and the same primary may be captured as two different values by a camera (if the spectral power distributions of the primaries are different). A camera has colors it can capture and encode as unique values compared to others, that are imaginary (not visible) to us. There are colors we can see, but the camera can't capture that are imaginary to it. Most of the colors the camera can "see" we can see as well. Yet some cameras can “see colors“ outside the spectral locus however every attempt is usually made to filter those out. Most important is the fact that cameras “see colors“ inside the spectral locus differently than humans. I know of no shipping camera that meets the Luther-Ives condition. This means that cameras exhibit significant observer metameric failure compared to humans. The camera color space differs from a more common working color space in that it does not have a unique one to one transform to and from CIE XYZ. This is because the camera has different color filters than the human eye, and thus "sees" colors differently. Any translation from camera color space to CIE XYZ space is therefore an approximation. 

This is ALL before a DCP profile of any kind enters the picture. 

For ICC profiles, it's all done with output rendered images, NOT raw! 

The idea expressed that someone's profiles are made to match colors to the reality... Isn't correct, either marketing nonsense of misunderstanding. 

The point is that if you think of camera primaries you can come to many incorrect conclusions because cameras capture spectrally. On the other hand, displays create colors using primaries. Primaries are defined colorimetrically so any color space defined using primaries is colorimetric. Native (raw) camera color spaces are almost never colorimetric, and therefore cannot be defined using primaries. Therefore, the measured pixel values don't even produce a gamut until they're mapped into a particular RGB space. Before then, *all* colors are (by definition) possible. 

Raw image data is in some native camera color space, but it is not a colorimetric color space, and has no single “correct” relationship to colorimetry. The same thing could be said about a color film negative. 

AGAIN, all factual before a DCP profile ever finds it's way into processing! 

Someone has to make a choice of how to convert values in non-colorimetric color spaces to colorimetric ones. There are better and worse choices, but no single correct conversion (unless the “scene” you are photographing has only three independent colorants, like when we scan film).

Now ask about the important difference between color appearance and color perception. One has something to do with individual colors. One has to do with viewing an millions or more individual colors in context as an image.