on.raw.photography

Thank you very much for posting your raw sample images, as well as examples of where you ran into trouble with them.
I have now looked at the material and processed the examples myself. The important point is that I do not see a general problem with ColorPerfect when the expected workflows are used ...

In a longer perspective, perhaps (like in DSLRs etc.) a given area (typically in the middle of the frame) could be defined, as an alternative to the "whole frame" approach?

No, too messy. The idea of an enforced center-weighted algorithm falls short of what should really be done: implementing ...

Quick Update - i watched the youTube Tutorial and i realsied that i had not switched from ColorPos to perfect raw... now it looks good regading slides..

Yes PerfectRAW makes slides pretty straigt forward I suppose, actually more so than ColorPos at times.

Regarding the digitization of negative ...

Wilmot, welcome aboard.

What you write about using ColorPerfect not only for negatives but for your digital photographs as well is very much to the point. A great many current imaging pipelines impose their own preferred contrast relations, colour biases, and that recognisable contemporary digital ...

Hello Jochen,

welcome aboard, and thank you for the lovely introduction.

Anyone whose path runs from a Praktica in East Germany through Ricoh and Nikon, via black and white, colour, lab work, and even prints from Kodachrome slides, is clearly in very good company here. I am very much looking ...

One additional thought on the issue of problematic borders and automated processing you mentioned by mail:

The actions we provide in the downloadable ColorPerfect action set can themselves be used as steps inside a larger Photoshop action of your own. That makes it possible to build a two-stage ...

Read these two pages initially:

https://www.colorperfect.com/restoring/settings/from/previous/use/of/ColorPerfect/
https://www.colorperfect.com/automating/ColorPerfect/with/Adobe/Photoshop/actions/or/scripting/

That outlines both the capabilities and the limitations of using ColorPerfect in ...

Hello Mario,

first of all, welcome aboard — and welcome to ColorPerfect 3 . I am sure you will find quite a few things in it to enjoy.

And yes, I know what you mean about cameras. At some point one stops owning a few cameras and starts becoming responsible for a growing collection.

As to your ...

Here is a quick update from Saturday, January 17, 2026.

Even though mid-January in the northern hemisphere isn’t ideal for controlled daylight work (low noon sun angle), I managed to get a short window around noon with roughly half an hour of genuinely usable direct sun.

In that window, I captured ...

Thanks for the detailed write-up — the Indigo RAW + ColorPerfect results you’re showing are very interesting, and the way you’ve separated the three iPhone “RAW” pipelines is exactly the right approach.

One important detail that may not be obvious to everyone reading: “Indigo” here is Adobe’s ...

Indeed, and a healthy and peaceful year on top of that.

I’d like to ask whether this type of ColorChecker is suitable for PerfectRAW characterization.
I currently have a Calibrite ColorChecker Classic (24-patch), including the neutral gray panel, and I’m planning to create a RAW color characterization for the iPhone 16 promax.
Yes that is perfectly ...

Welcome and RAW Characterization for the vivo X100 Ultra

Hi fsantos,

welcome aboard — great to have you here! I’m glad to hear you are exploring RAW capture on the vivo X100 Ultra and that your first impressions with ColorPerfect were positive.
PerfectRAW in ColorPerfect 3 takes things even ...

Why Pakon RAW Files Are So Dark

The Pakon scanners store their planar RAW data essentially as the direct numerical output of the scanner’s analog-digital converter. For the F235, a 14-bit ADC is explicitly documented. For the F135, F135 Plus and F335 models, various specification sheets mention ...

Using MakeTiff With Pakon RAW Files in Linear Scan Mode

As you have discovered, MakeTiff has a dedicated mode for processing linear scans which can also handle Pakon RAW files. This currently is an undocumented feature, but it is fully implemented on both Windows and macOS.

What MakeTiff Does ...

In the intermediate DNG used for interpolation we find:
| | 11) BlackLevel = 8943 8943 8943 (8943/1 8943/1 8943/1)
| | - Tag 0xc61a (24 bytes, rational64u[3])


That comes from the CR2 but is scaled by 4
(doubled once per bit step from 14 bit in our CR2 to 16 bit - spread out in the DNG ...

Great, I will look at your image later and see whether I can find out anything about why this might happen — by examining its metadata and trying a few parametric interpolation alternatives.

In the meantime, I can explain why SmartClip does not engage if the highlights do not touch the right edge ...

For Smart Clip it is required that the overexposed image areas actually touch the right end of the histogram. There have been situations where, after interpolation, that was not the case in images I’ve seen. Most often, this was related to dcraw doing the interpolation. I don't know about libraw ...

AutoColor is a very versatile tool as long as the main light source — in terms of specular reflections or the brightest regions of the image — is essentially the governing brightest sensation in the frame. As soon as that is not the case, which can very well happen in a macro shot of a vividly ...

The Blackpoint, the CC filter pack, and the Black implementation go all the way back to the very beginning of the ColorPerfect project, so we are easily looking at ~15 years of history there. I would need to check specific edge-case behavior, but one thing is certain: changing the selected color ...

You are very welcome to ask all these questions — in fact, this is exactly what I hoped would happen on this forum. As time goes on, many of these items will already have been discussed and can simply be referenced, which is why I try to write things in a reusable, generally helpful way.

In ...

This sounds straightforward at first, but it is actually a fairly nuanced question. We can broadly differentiate between calibration and per-image adjustment .
FilmType , SubType , and FilmGamma represent the characterization of a film stock and processing chain for a whole roll, often multiple ...

When we talk about the Film Type , Sub Type , and Film Gamma system in ColorPerfect, and we apply that thinking to black-and-white photographs, it becomes clear that Film Type and Sub Type lose their original meaning — but not their effect. In color work, Film Type and Sub Type exist to encode the ...

Well, why don’t we do that then? I’ve got the hat on moderation-wise, so I can always split topics — and I just did.

I expect many photographers will connect to the following situation. We’re somewhere — maybe even in a car — and suddenly we see that magical light . There’s no other way to describe it. It’s usually late in the day, and it often comes with a tremendous variance in possible color balances : deep ...