Flaat suite of picture controls for Nikon DSLRs: beta 1

Samuel H

Samuel H

Major Contributor
After learning that Nikons can also work with picture contros designed in the PC, I've started work on a suite of Flaat picture controls for the D800.

So far I've only got a preliminary version of one member of the family: Portrait-based, super-high-DR

It's a preliminary version because it's not smooth enough yet: it wiggles a bit in a couple of places, but it's so painful to work with Nikon's ViewNX2 software, and without an actual camera, that I'd rather have this one tested before working any further.

So: I need testers for both the D800 and D7000, please write to similaar.feedback at gmail.com

The pitch: stops of DR using...
Canon DSLR (any of them) with CineStyle: 10 stops
D800 with Neutral and minimum contrast: 10.5 stops
Canon DSLR (any of them) with Flaat_12p: 11.5 stops (in the old cameras, at least the darkest stop, noisy at all ISOs)
RED ONE MX (Zacuto shootout): 12 stops
D800 with preliminary version of Flaat_13p: slightly over 13 stops, maybe 13.2
and dare I say...
Arri Alexa (Zacuto shootout): 14.1 stops
Film (Zacuto shotout): 14.2-14.5 stops

The bad side: this super-high-DR picture style is sure to have some issues:
* banding in the midtones and highlights, because spreading an 8-bit-deep color space across 13 stops of DR is spreading it quite thin
* noise in the shadows, because there's very little light hitting them (actualy, with Neutral+mincontrast a big chunk of them would be mostly clipped to pure black)
Luckily, the solution for both of these is the same: slight denoise, slight add noise/grain (as per Stu Maschwitz's anti-banding advice)

(I've already been told I can't expand the recorded dynamic range playing with curves only; I know I can do it with the Canons; we'll know soon enough if that's the case with the Nikons too...)
 
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perfect - write me to the address above and I'll send you the picture control and instructions
 
I'm making these specifically for the D800, but I guess they'll work just as well on the D7000 (from experience with the canons)
send me an email and I'll send you the file and instructions
if it works on the D7000 too, I'll need a bunch of very specific RAW stills taken with it to evaluate if the same profile can be used for both the D800 and D7000 without issues (but first I have to hear that this is actually working reasonably good, and get a better, more polished version for the D800 out)


also, to the testers: you should see over a stop more to the highlights, and over a stop more to the shadows; noise-wise, using this picture style is as if you had increased ISO by one stop (i.e. ISO 800 with Flaat_13p will look like ISO 1600 with Neutral+mincontrast)
 
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The first tests are in, and they're not as good as I expected but not absolutely horrible either

It seems like the camera applies a transformation to the color space first, then applies the color profile, then sends the image to the codec. This limits a lot what I can do with the picture profile: I'm not getting as much DR in camera as the same profile delivers in viewNX, and the heavily-pushed-up shadows are noisy as hell, even at ISO 100

applying the heavy curve before the codec comes in has nice advantages, but it's definitely not as nice as it could be

I'll try with a less-aggressive profile, aiming at something between 12 and 12.5 stops of DR
 
Do you think the uncompressed hdmi would make a difference because with the hacked gh2 there is a ton of detailed that is preserve in the shadows and you can dig much further thus increasing the DR, at least the usable DR. It would be very good if we could get 12.5 stops, the 13+ would be insane. Thank for your testing and I hope that you get your hand on a D800 soon, it could a hell of a camera. The video below show already a lot of DR

 
I whink it won't: the problem is that the camera first crushes most of the DR, then applies the picture profile; getting it back generates a ton of noise: in that final stop, it seems like, before the picture profile is applied, only 3 or 4 shades are alive; I can get them far apart, but it's noisy as hell

I'm uploading the test
 
Perhaps we should petition Nikon to give us a flatter profile, they seem keen from some interview to embrace the HDslr movement. This camera would be a cornerstone for them.
 
Samuel H said:
The first tests are in, and they're not as good as I expected but not absolutely horrible either

It seems like the camera applies a transformation to the color space first, then applies the color profile, then sends the image to the codec. This limits a lot what I can do with the picture profile: I'm not getting as much DR in camera as the same profile delivers in viewNX, and the heavily-pushed-up shadows are noisy as hell, even at ISO 100
Click to expand...

Thanks for your work!

Wondering how you determined this was the order. I'm used to RAW stills workflow with Capture NX, so this seem out of whack. Of course the video is not RAW once it is converted to some readable (though uncompressed) video stream in the process of which - according to your theory - it gets a color space/LUT applied. Come to think of it, I guess your order would make sense as a way to apply a profile developed in a RAW developer to a video file. I hope you're wrong about the order, but unfortunately it makes some sense. I would have hoped the profile would be applied while the video file was being created from raw sensor data. I guess that's one reason RED cameras cost what they do. Have you tried making a profile in Capture NX and applying it? I've never bothered to use ViewNX, or even bothered to load custom profiles into a camera, so I don't know if the profiles from View and Capture work differently. Though at this point I'm probably grasping at straws.
 
I'm not 100% sure yet, but that's my theory so far

this is the test (shot by Latyshev on a D800), maybe somebody else can find a different plausible explanation: http://vimeo.com/39543745

I'll ask Latyshev to shoot a video test with Flaat_13p_beta1 and take a RAW still with the same settings; that way we could see if images are processed differently in-camera and in-viewNX2
 
I've got a beta-2 version ready, I just sent it to the beta-1 testers
it's a bit less aggressive (it aims for 12.7 stops of DR instead of 13.2, let's hope this keeps the shadows somewhat less noisy), and much smoother (a lot closer to what I would consider "release-ready")
if anybody else wants to give it a try, write to similaar.feedback at gmail.com
in the meantime, I'll start work on the workhorse option (Flaat_10p)
 
you can see its light response in the other thread (the one I just linked to), compared with other options
I'd say that's a solid 11 stops

the Nikons definitely have a lot more DR even without fussing around with picture styles: in Canon, all you can get with the default profiles, and playing with contrast settings, etc, is a bit over 9 stops of DR; CineStyle and Marvels Cine go to 10 stops; Flaat_11 would be the highest I would go if I was afraid of noise in the shadows; with the Nikons, all my measures are less accurate, but I'd say Neutral with minimum contrast delivers over 10 stops of DR; and I think Flaat_12 will be definitely useable (it will have noise in the shadows, but not more than Flaat_11 in the Canons)
 
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