Finally, a D300 Near UniWB JPEG

lovEU wrote:

Why is it such difficult to get all parties to one place? No real
conference organized by some of the big players like IEC, ICC or so?

I think digital imaging is very synthetic (as in synthesis of many very different fields of science and engineering) and complicated; it is also a field of fierce competition as a lot of trade secrets involved along the path starting from capturing light and to the final image.

What I basically want is that pro and semi-pro lines of cameras continue to exist with the primary goal of image-taking, not image-processing (unless we are talking Polaroids here). It means we want to close the gap between the terms used by, say, hand-held meters -- and terms used to present the result on the back of the camera. Seeing that histogram is to the left of the right wall by 4mm, how do we know what exposure compensation to use? Why the question of the zone where the eye can recognize maximum amount of details seems to be never asked in conjunction to metering standards? Where this zone of maximum perceived details is positioned on the histogram? How to isolate the subject and see the histogram of the subject only? Why not to indicate the focusing distance and approximate DoF? Those are just some examples of questions that should be answered by the joint effort of ISO, camera making companies, and photographers.

Colour profiling and other raw processing tasks will be easier if the spectral characteristics of the sensors are known. At this stage we can only dream of that. Current camera profiling software, including ProfileMaker, are of very limited use for general profiling. They should at least allow accurate manipulations of 4-channel linear data at the input and create floating point transforms to perceptually uniform Lab space, like UpLab which allow saturation moves without introducing colour shifts. They should not mess with tone curves, too. They should allow easy creation of multi-shot bracketed sources of known targets to better define colour gamuts. They should allow easy creation of spot-colour targets; those are the only way to profile for mineral pigments found in oil paintings and organics in water-colours,... Those issues are in the hands of ICC, software designers, and photographers.

And of course we have certain questions when it comes to raw conversion. For example: what one is supposed to do if he exposed to the right, but the subject is 2-3 stops underexposed as a result?

I trust we are up to some slow progress in the above; hopefully, step by step improvements instead of gimmicks and "more Photoshop in the camera". Separate committees/sessions/sections with clear agendas are most welcome.