[stevebrot]

My experience with importing K-70 DNGs into Lightroom CC was not good. The images seemed a bit out of focus and noisy.

Welcome to the Pentax Forums!

Sorry you are having such problems with processing RAW files from your K-70. Until you get full support from your tool of choice (e.g. Adobe Lightroom), working with RAW can be challenging. I am surprised you had quality issues using the embedded profile from the DNG. The profile contains tone curves and color mapping information and is not involved with sharpening or noise reduction.

As you found out, the DCU software will work, but behavior and installation on Apple products can be a source of frustration. In addition, the tool is fairly primitive. As you have discovered, conversion to TIFF is an option, but does result in loss of maker-specific stuff. If you want to apply lens corrections, do it in DCU prior to exporting as TIFF.

Adobe camera profiles are sort of a strange thing. The DNG specification requires an embedded profile. With camera-generated DNG, this is created by the manufacturer and is often fairly minimal. The eventual "Adobe Standard" and other profiles are the result of collaboration between the manufacturer and Adobe. These usually trail the camera release by a couple of months and are generally an improvement over the embedded version. That being said, there are some users that prefer embedded. To each their own.

Things could be worse...You could be using a camera that does not support DNG.


Steve

[stevebrot]

Particularly when you're talking about a raw photo format, dcraw is open source and will serve as documentation of the file format if nothing else, chances are if I really had to I could write the decoder myself on some mythical new system which can't run dcraw.

Yep, you can simply save a copy of dcraw (source and .exe) along with the files you are archiving. I don't anticipate that C-code will be orphaned at any time in the next few decades.


Steve

[Oakland Rob]

I don't use the Pentax settings and prefer to use something like a Passport Colorchecker to set profiles myself. Might be a good plan for the OP since they're useful for the life of the camera, even after Adobe gets the various camera profiles set. I used it before my K-3II had such support and still do. DCU is just awful, as noted. It does all sorts of inexplicable stuff; like I just noticed on some recent DNGs that it had everything with a WB set to flash when that wasn't the camera setting (I leave it on auto by default).

As for the never ending PEF vs DNG debate, I prefer DNG because of error checking, which trumps any potential writing errors IMHO. Not to mention that I'm error prone and have lost the sidecars in the past, something that I don't have to worry about with DNG. That also occurred when I had a drive problem and had to restore some files minus the pre existing filenames; synching up the restored sidecars with the original photos was a HUGE chore I prefer not to repeat. Still, sidecars can be handy since it's a fast way to transfer edits and adjustments (as Mylio does). I keep wishing Adobe would at least let us have the option of using them at times with DNG.

[stevebrot]

I don't use the Pentax settings and prefer to use something like a Passport Colorchecker to set profiles myself. Might be a good plan for the OP since they're useful for the life of the camera, even after Adobe gets the various camera profiles set.

At some point, maybe you could do an article or start a thread detailing how making your own camera profile is done. I think it would be very helpful to many on this site, particularly for people who want quality results in Lightroom with a yet unsupported camera.


Steve

[Oakland Rob]

At some point, maybe you could do an article or start a thread detailing how making your own camera profile is done. I think it would be very helpful to many on this site, particularly for people who want quality results in Lightroom with a yet unsupported camera.


Steve

I'll defer to the Xrite folks...since they get paid for that.

They have lotsa videos; here's one for the Passport and Lr:

You Tube

You Tube

[PhotoNomad0]

Welcome to the Pentax Forums!

Sorry you are having such problems with processing RAW files from your K-70. Until you get full support from your tool of choice (e.g. Adobe Lightroom), working with RAW can be challenging. I am surprised you had quality issues using the embedded profile from the DNG. The profile contains tone curves and color mapping information and is not involved with sharpening or noise reduction.

As you found out, the DCU software will work, but behavior and installation on Apple products can be a source of frustration. In addition, the tool is fairly primitive. As you have discovered, conversion to TIFF is an option, but does result in loss of maker-specific stuff. If you want to apply lens corrections, do it in DCU prior to exporting as TIFF.

Adobe camera profiles are sort of a strange thing. The DNG specification requires an embedded profile. With camera-generated DNG, this is created by the manufacturer and is often fairly minimal. The eventual "Adobe Standard" and other profiles are the result of collaboration between the manufacturer and Adobe. These usually trail the camera release by a couple of months and are generally an improvement over the embedded version. That being said, there are some users that prefer embedded. To each their own.

Things could be worse...You could be using a camera that does not support DNG.


Steve

Thanks for the insight. I was just so used to pulling in RAW images from my K-5 and everything just worked. It does seem that the DCU is applying significant sharpening and noise reduction (and this is with doing format conversion only). Sometimes it seems to over-sharpen leaving a halo around things. Maybe I just need to play around in LR to find similar settings. After 10 years using LR just haven't had to worry about these things.

Bruce

[PhotoNomad0]

Thanks for the insight. I was just so used to pulling in RAW images from my K-5 and everything just worked. It does seem that the DCU is applying significant sharpening and noise reduction (and this is with doing format conversion only). Sometimes it seems to over-sharpen leaving a halo around things. Maybe I just need to play around in LR to find similar settings. After 10 years using LR just haven't had to worry about these things.

Bruce

@stevebrot

After doing some more checking of Pentax K-70 RAW images in Lightroom, it looks like the problems I am seeing are just with high ISO (6400+). My first experiments with the K-70 were taking hummingbird pictures and the high ISO allowed me to use high shutter speed with sufficient depth of field to capture sharp images. At lower ISOs, the RAW files seem to process fine in LR using the embedded profile. At ISO 6400 and above, the pictures are very grainy, washed out and color balance is off. It looks like DCU is doing a lot of noise reduction, sharpening, and color cleanup even with just doing save as TIFF. I tried getting the same results in LR using the original DNG, but gave up in frustration. The DCU seems to be doing so much it was too hard for me to replicate.

The upside for me is that I have discovered that I can use LR for most of my regular shooting even before full camera support. And now I have a better sense of why some images we so much worse than others.

Thanks for the help.

Bruce

[PhotoNomad0]

A new Lightroom CC has just been released with K-70 support. The new standard profile seems to be better color than the embedded profile, but not a huge difference. Where the big difference is in speed of showing clear images at 1:1 on my MacBook Pro. The previous version would take a long time showing the "loading..." popup on the image, and even after the "loading..." popup was removed, it would still be a while. The new version seems to take about half the time, but there is still a delay after the "loading..." popup is removed. But the overall speed up makes that less objectionable.

[KDD]

K-70 PEF ACR 9.8 Lightroom 6.8

[k70k1000]

awesome