Nuking the DNG Camera Profile [Now w/ script]

[DaRana]

Thanks Ravedog. I’ll add the paths to the readme and check out that link.

 

[Brojon]

Hey GMack, so I came full circle on this. Thanks for the suggestion. I just made a modified version of this last night. I happened to have a smallish piece (8.5" x 7.5") of 1/2" plywood in my car from a project -- when I went to fly Friday it occurred to me that it is just large enough for the p4p to sit on for calibration/takeoff. It is also a perfect size to then pick up, put on my lap, and be a small little "desk" for the remote control when I'm sitting in my folding chair.

Finished+stained the board and printed out a color checker with the addition of a 8" x 1.5" grey card strip. I laminated it and epoxied that to the board last night. It's glossier than I'd like due to the laminate but should be good enough for a ballpark/better than nothing. I've also been testing turning the gimbal down about 45 degrees onto a card on the ground before takeoff - using either white for ETTR or neutral grey for centerline on the ground - and it seems to give a decent exposure and not get modified much if at all for macro light falloff. Hope is that this can serve for that as well.

So yeah, thanks again for sharing the suggestion. Overall it isn't massively larger than the regular color checker - if it works well I may make a 2nd version a little bigger.

Getting up to speed on the nuances of the P4P in anticipation of mine coming in.
I've been a photographer for decades and have a color managed workflow - I'm pretty knowledgeable about these things.
The color checker is unique in that it uses special formulations for teh ink used to print them. The color is identical regardless of illumination source.
What this means practically speaking is that the home printed card will most likely not work since the colors read will vary with the light. Light changes constantly through the day and trying to balance using this card will be frustrating at best. Where you'll really get into problems is artificial sources such as sodium vapor, incandescent and fluorescent lighting.
This is an interesting topic but it is not all that unusual for a lens to have significant vignetting on a WA lens. I agree that DJI likely decided to fix it in software rather than design a new and likely larger/heavier lens.

 

[DaRana]

Getting up to speed on the nuances of the P4P in anticipation of mine coming in.
I've been a photographer for decades and have a color managed workflow - I'm pretty knowledgeable about these things.
The color checker is unique in that it uses special formulations for teh ink used to print them. The color is identical regardless of illumination source.
What this means practically speaking is that the home printed card will most likely not work since the colors read will vary with the light. Light changes constantly through the day and trying to balance using this card will be frustrating at best. Where you'll really get into problems is artificial sources such as sodium vapor, incandescent and fluorescent lighting.
This is an interesting topic but it is not all that unusual for a lens to have significant vignetting on a WA lens. I agree that DJI likely decided to fix it in software rather than design a new and likely larger/heavier lens.

Hey Brojon. Yeah, I never expected the home printed colorchecker to work remotely as well as the actual color checker. In the end, I don't ever use it for that purpose. However, I do use it every time I fly because I mounted it to a small, sanded and finished piece of plywood and found that it is an excellent mini portable "desk" in my lap when flying sitting! Happy accidents.

(Actually, I've used the grey card part a handful of times, but that's "close enough")

As far as trying to balance w/ it as light changes, 100%. I haven't made all of them for the DJI cameras yet, but I have a dozen+ "generic" profiles for each of my Canon bodies, then multiplied out more when you add in dual sources and "unique" sources such as product boxes. It's an afternoon's job for each new body but more than pays off in the long run having the library to go to.

Anyways, it's sort of buried in everything else, but there are a set of generic color profilesto download for the P4P for sunny, cloudy, etc made with the actual colorchecker, not the home printed version. You can find the link at the top of the first post where I made an update.

 

[Brojon]

Hey Brojon. Yeah, I never expected the home printed colorchecker to work remotely as well as the actual color checker. In the end, I don't ever use it for that purpose. However, I do use it every time I fly because I mounted it to a small, sanded and finished piece of plywood and found that it is an excellent mini portable "desk" in my lap when flying sitting! Happy accidents.

(Actually, I've used the grey card part a handful of times, but that's "close enough")

As far as trying to balance w/ it as light changes, 100%. I haven't made all of them for the DJI cameras yet, but I have a dozen+ "generic" profiles for each of my Canon bodies, then multiplied out more when you add in dual sources and "unique" sources such as product boxes. It's an afternoon's job for each new body but more than pays off in the long run having the library to go to.

Anyways, it's sort of buried in everything else, but there are a set of generic color profiles to download for the P4P for sunny, cloudy, etc made with the actual colorchecker, not the home printed version. You can find the link at the top of the first post where I made an update.

Saw that - was not not aware made with actual CC - awesome sauce!
I made profiles for morning and evening golden hour and high noon. It does make a difference. Cloudy days I shoot with the cloudy color balance and deal with it since it's gonna be blue no matter what.

 

[DaRana]

Saw that - was not not aware made with actual CC - awesome sauce!
I made profiles for morning and evening golden hour and high noon. It does make a difference. Cloudy days I shoot with the cloudy color balance and deal with it since it's gonna be blue no matter what.

Yeah, lots of rambling amidst the actual useful bits. Impressed you parsed as much as you did from it!

FWIW while the built in color profile is decent, even in cloudy I find a better color response using the custom profiles. Not as significant as a DSLR, but still noticeable if you look at a color card w/ the profile applied vs not.

I tend to find so far that at least my Mavic and the P4P seem trend towards a blue cast in the shadows. It's probably partially due to just shooting from this perspective we see more shaded areas, but curious if you've noticed that. I have a few custom RGB curves w/ the blue channel dropped down in the shadows that I usually apply in Lightroom, makes a nice diff.

 

[Brojon]

My Mavic seems neutral/slightly bluish - but that's pretty much normal for most shade.
Eager to get my P4P tomorrow and try it out.

 

[DaRana]

Oh, congrats! I started w/ the Mavic first, too, then on to the P4P. I love the mavic still, but the P4P camera is stunning. You're going to love it.

 

[bsartist]

Here are Lightroom/Photoshop/Camera Raw lens profiles (RAW+JPG versions). These are only for RAW files that have been stripped of the embedded lens profile (at minimum "OpCodeList3" among others as desired). It will apply lens distortion correction (almost identical to DJI's profile except retaining a larger field of view and less distortion scaling), Vignetting and Aberrations.

I created these from shooting actual test charts using the P4A camera (official Adobe lens profile tool). I might go back a redo another set of test charts just to compare any variations that might show or increase accuracy further (see if I can get data closer into the 4 corners) but they appear to be good to go as is anyway.

*** Rename .txt to .lcp ***

In windows 10 and Lightroom CC the folder to place these files for Lightroom is:

C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\CameraRaw\LensProfiles\1.0

Note change "username" to your user folder.

Thank you for creating them. I loaded these in the system library folder right next to the Phantom 3 profiles I downloaded awhile ago. But when I select the profile in ACR 6.7 it says the profile won't load. I checked ownership and permissions. I also noticed the XML syntax was different than the Phantom 3 (which works fine) so I created a new version of yours mimicking the Phantom 3 format but using all your values. Still won't load. Any ideas? I'd love to get this going. Thanks.
Bill

 

[Brojon]

BTW - as an FYI the latest Corel Paintshop Pro 2018 has lens and RAW correction for the Mavic and Phantom 4 Pro cameras.
I was running the demo since they had a special going and I was shocked to say the least.
Makes you wonder why Adobe is sitting on their duff...