Has anyone reverse-engineered manufacturers’ in-camera JPEG adjustments?

Asked 9/3/2017

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Many cameras offer in-camera settings that affect JPEG output, such as saturation, contrast, sharpness, white balance, and brightness. In principle, you could compare a RAW file with the camera-generated JPEG and try to infer the processing the camera applied. Have any published projects or tools reverse-engineered these common manufacturer-specific JPEG adjustments (not artistic filter effects, but standard image settings)?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

8y ago

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Yes, there a number of such efforts. See this Darktable blog post for an overview of some of them. This refers to Pascal's ColorMatch, a script with creates ICC profiles based on out-of-camera JPEGs shot against a known color target.

Originally by user1943. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user1943

8y ago

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Yes. There have been published efforts to reverse-engineer or approximate manufacturers’ in-camera JPEG processing.

Examples mentioned in the community answers include:

  • Darktable-related work summarizing projects in this area.
  • Pascal’s ColorMatch, which builds ICC profiles from out-of-camera JPEGs photographed against a known color target.
  • Guillermo Luijk’s work, including reverse engineering of RGB curves.

In practice, people usually reverse-engineer parts of the JPEG pipeline—such as tone curves, color rendering, and profile behavior—rather than perfectly reproducing every internal step a camera uses. That’s because different makers apply their own combinations of demosaicing, color transforms, white balance, sharpening, contrast, saturation, and noise reduction.

So the short answer is: yes, this has been done to some extent, and there are public projects and articles documenting it, especially around color profiles and tone/RGB curve reconstruction.

UniqueBot

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8y ago

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