Sony RX100 Mark V slog 2 picture profile ruined in Lightrom and ARC

[signum71]

Greetings,

on the sony RX100 one has the opportunity to shoot fotos with a Slog2 Picture Profile. I do underwater photography and was delighted at the opportunity, but lightroom and ARC do interpret the data horribly wrong and ruin the image. instead of the flat looking image (which is good for color grading underwater footage) the images are horribly underexposed and a lot of information is missing. How can I import these images properly into Lightroom or adobe camera raw?

Best regards,

Tom

[johnrellis]

See this thread: Re: Importing ARW files from Sony A7s2 in Sony Slog3

[signum71]

Thank you Johnrellis, I have seen this but does that mean all my pictures are ruined now or do I simply grade them back to normal and accept how they look. I think Lightroom is entirely misinterpreting the file since I took the pictures with +2 EV and the histogram is nice and centered in camera but looks like crap in LR. So Lightroom is changing more than just the picture profile. If LR can't handle it, is there any other software you know if that can read the files as they are in camera? There must be something, otherwise why does sony even offer an slog 2 profile on stills? It does not make any sense to me

[johnrellis · Accepted solution]

LR is indeed "misinterpreting" the photo, since it doesn't know how to interpret Sony raw files recorded with the PP7 setting (S-Log2). As explained in the other thread, Adobe Camera Raw is expecting a .arw file to contain the raw sensor data, encoded according to Sony's standard raw format (without PP7).

You could try Sony's Image Data Converter to convert the photos and then either edit them in Image Data Converter or export them as 16-bit TIFFs to LR.  I just did a simple experiment with a PP7 .arw, and Image Data Converter yielded a very flat but reasonably exposed image (what people are used to seeing when they edit log video and stills prior to properly decoding the log format with a LUT).

I don't know if other raw converters know how to interpret Sony S-Log2 raw files.  I'd guess not, but that's just a guess.

why does sony even offer an slog 2 profile on stills?

I have no idea why Sony provides S-Log2 for raw stills. As discussed in the other thread, raw files capture the full dynamic range of the sensor, and applying an S-Log2 encoding to the raw sensor data doesn't allow any more information to be captured.  A quick Google search didn't enlighten, but perhaps someone knows a more authoritative answer.

Providing S-Log2 for JPEG stills could be useful for those shooting S-Log2 video. The stills could be processed in the same workflow used for the video, e.g. in Premiere Pro or Resolve.

One thing I just read about S-Log2 stills: They have a minimum ISO of 1600, with the attendant increased noise from that higher ISO (at least on some Sony cameras).