Technicolor Cinestyle

I have not tried it, but I don't see how it could make any difference if you're shooting RAW stills. Seems like a pretty nice tool for shooting video though.

I have experimented briefly with bracketing and doing HDR to get more dynamic range on some particularly brilliant coins, but I haven't got a keeper shot from those experiments yet.

RAW really is RAW; the image data isn't even demosaiced, let alone had a color profile applied. It just has some additional metadata attached saying what the camera settings were when the picture was taken. When you load it in some sort of RAW reading program (DPP, Adobe Camera Raw, etc.), that metadata is applied automatically. Half the point of RAW is that the original sensor data is preserved and interpreted at the latest possible stage (the other half is the extra bit-depth and dynamic range).

So if, for example, you took a shot with the white balance set to "tungsten" and then later change it to "daylight" or whatever in DPP, it will give you the exact same result as if you had set it to "daylight" in the first place (assuming the camera didn't somehow change the aperture, ISO or shutter speed as a consequence of changing the white balance settings). The same is true of other settings (in-camera sharpening, color profile, etc.)

Color profiles and whatnot only get baked into the actual pixel data if you're shooting JPEG or video. My understanding is that the Cinestyle profile is intended to give a color curve that gives an editor the maximum amount of wiggle-room possible in the 8-bit video format. That's basically the point of a non-linear gamma in 8-bit files in the first place, although Cinestyle surely does a better job than ordinary sRGB at distributing those bits usefully. RAW already gives you the maximum wiggle-room possible with the sensor and A/D converters in the hardware.

So, if you're shooting RAW, you should be able to get the identical effect by choosing the Cinestyle profile in DPP after shooting. The only difference would be if a change in exposure settings came along for the ride with the profile (e.g. it intentionally underexposes to avoid blowing highlights).

The camera settings (color profile, etc.) ARE applied to a preview JPEG which is embedded in the RAW file, and that's used for the thumbnails, previews and histograms by some software.

My point was that you can't view a RAW file, so you are always beholden to a "style" to interpret the raw data, and that style applies color or levels info to the data as part of the display process. So what you see is not really RAW, but an interpretation of the raw data.

Interestingly, the Cinestyle profile is not available in DPP unless the shot was made with it. There may be some way to access it but it seems the profile is somehow embedded into the file as metadata for that shot.

It's not clear to me how styles work with RAW format. I took two images of a Cent: one with Standard style 0,0,0,0; and the second with Cinestyle 0,0,0,0. When viewing the files in DPP, they look very different, yet the histograms, gamma curve, etc all look identical. Outputting them to jpg results in what I saw on the screen, now of course with very different looking histograms. It seems there is another set of factors being applied to the RAW data that are not shown in DPP yet have a profound impact on the output. This alters the "starting point" when editing the RAW file yet there is no indication of the different starting point within the editor. What's going on here?

Photobucket seems to be down at the moment. I'll upload the two photos once I get access to my albums...Ray

OK, Photobucket is done with maintenance...

Here is the coin shot with Standard 0,0,0,0


And here it is shot with Cinestyle 0,0,0,0


The two shots showed the exact same histogram, gamma curve, and levels settings in DPP yet when output to jpg have a very different appearance.

The RAW histogram is static in DPP. I assume the histogram represents the raw sensor data. As you change the various settings for levels, gamma, etc the histogram remains static, but the program applies gamma curve, black threshold, and white threshold as overlays. The "style" seems to act as an invisible overlay that shows up only on the output RGB histogram but no information about what the style is actually doing shows up in the RAW editing tab.

JB...As displayed above, the Standard photo is a much better representation, but both photos are essentially unprocessed and need adjustment before I'd be satisfied with them. The question I have isn't if the unprocessed output is more faithful, but does the applied "style" make any difference to the final output, or make it easier to get to the desired final output? I don't yet have an answer for this. Cinestyle seems to apply an aggressive non-linear gamma curve as an "invisible" overlay, and I am still evaluating to see if that overlay makes it easier to get to an acceptable final output versus the other available styles. What I am thinking at this point is that these "styles" are capable of applying an overlay that may not be possible to reproduce (or compensate for) with the limited adjustments offered in standard editing tools. Certainly a simple tool like DPP doesn't offer this level of adjustment, and I don't believe any of the Adobe products do either. The "style" seems to be a method to allow complex overlays for particular purposes. I need to do more research on this...Ray