Scene/display-referred, rgb, Lab....help

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Scene/display-referred, rgb, Lab....help

Shaikailash

Hi all, I noticed that many tutorials assume the viewer is familiar with what scene-referred & similar terms mean, what a color space is, what sRGB means, what a tone curve is, etc...

As a complete newbie I struggle with this. Ok, I understood that people suggest to adopt a scene-referred RGB workflow, also "linear", but what does this imply in practice? Could you recommend some articles or tutorial for dummies which guide the newbies to understand what is important to understand? Thanks

P.S. I found some articles which were supposed to clarify this, yet it doesn't help to read stuff like this: "First of all, what do we mean by “linear”? If y is linear with respect to x, it means there’s a relationship between x and y in the form y= a . x + b, where a and b are real constants. Linear means proportional to something plus or minus a constant."

MrSteveVee

I am sure that someone more clever than me can answer, but from my viewpoint I find that some poeple like to go deep into the technology of how image manipulation works and others like to manipulate an image with no desire to know how it works under thehood so to speak, I am the latter unfortunaly so from my viewpoint half of this stuff is unecessary to know. This means I know enough about the basic foundations to manipulate an image witthout needing to know how it works or the technical terms used for it
So to answer you 4 questions,
Scene defered, no idea, never had any call to even look it up
Color space: This is important and until you understand it, use sRGB that will be the default for now. Why? For a human, the colour space is te range of colours we can use. AdobeRGB Color space is a sub range of this that they have develped that will show an image to its best capabilities. sRGB is the a smaller colour space than AdobeRGB that was developed as a default by MS I believe and is pretty much used by the majority of screens etc. So unless you have a monitor that can siplay AdobeRGB you will only be able to use sRGB as it will not be able to display all of the AdobeRGB colours. This of course is a simple viewpoint and not 100% correct but you see the problem so just use sRGB for nowuntil you pick up a better understanding of what you want to do.
Tone curve. Look at the tone curve in darktable. Reset it to neutral and see how it is just a linier line, and the image is flat looking, adjust the by pulling parts up or down and see what happens, this is the "curve" and a pre-determined tone curve based on camera/model is applied to each raw image automatically when developing ao that the developed image resembles the look of the camera Jpeg image as your starting point
Steve.

jaw-dt

MrSteveVee Scene-Referred workflow and filmic rgb are sometimes used interchangeably but filmic is really a tool in the Scene-Referred workflow.

jaw-dt

Color space is a group of colors that the specific color space has. Adobe RGB and sRGB are color spaces. See color space here This tutorial here shows how to edit a photo in Scene-Referred workflow here with links to additional information.

Shaikailash

I'll try that tutorial, thanks and I now understand why I was confused since filmic is (mis)used to indicate the scene-referred workflow, but it's also the name of a tool!

I'm like you MrSteve, I don't really want to learn the technicalities but really only learn to edit my pictures. It's just that since I'm starting from scratch I thought to maybe learn the "new" workflow which is recommended, which is scene-referred as far as i understand, and i was a bit lost. a bit less lost now will surely come back with more questions