on.raw.photography

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 ...

For scans of color-negative film made with devices well suited to the task, such as Nikon’s long-discontinued medium-format CoolScan series, the funny thing to me has always been that everyone kept talking about removal of the orange mask. Yet that removal is actually a trivial matter — the real ...

You're already halfway there . As you correctly figured out, you need to be in the User Maker menu. Once you are in ColorNeg Mode’s User Maker menu, two new buttons appear at the bottom of the plugin: Save and Load .

To populate the list with entries from the Virtual Gradrs file, you need to load ...

I downloaded the virtual gradations VirtSWGrad.negpos
There's only one document, and I'm not sure how to use it on ColorPos, ColoNEG, and PerfectRAW.

As it stands, I designed the Virtual Grades many years ago to be used exclusively in ColorNeg mode when processing black and white negative film ...

For ColorNeg DC, I’d like to create a sibling documentation to the existing one for black and white film .

One more upside to the forum is that it gives me an opportunity to discuss much of the information I’ll eventually need to document — without first having to formally write and shape it into ...

Personally, I’ve used Capture One Pro for many years for exactly one feature — the magnifying loupe that lets you get onto the raw data to assess focus and so forth. To me, it is purely a culling tool, a workflow solution to manage my shoots.

I suppose that’s also why MakeTiff eventually got its ...

What about white balance setting in the digital camera, does it matter?


For reproductive photos of color negatives, the white balance information stored as metadata by the camera is fully irrelevant. That is because we do not strive to create a color-correct version of the still-negative ...

In Custom Compatibility, I see that the "Uncompressed" checkbox needs to be unchecked.
And in Preview/Fast Loading Data; no JPEG preview and uncheck "Embed Fast Loading Data."
The first is not relevant. Uncompressed just makes a bigger file. It is a lossless compression.
The second is also not ...

Hi Kevin,

welcome aboard - great to have you here! I’ve previously set you up by email, so you should already have both the plug-in and your personal key at hand.

Your capture setup sounds excellent — the HR Digaron 105 on a GFX sensor is as clean and consistent as it gets for camera scanning.
We ...