HOWTO: Use UFRaw with Canon SLR

This is a description on how you can use the UFRaw program to convert the raw files from a Canon Digital SLR to a more suitable format, such as TIFF or JPEG, using the right colour profile for the camera and so get the correct colour rendering. Canon Support told me that there is no official colour profile that may be used with third party software, but I have found some ICC files that seems to work. Please contact me if you find the howto useful or if you find errors that might be corrected.

You will need:

See also:

  1. First you'll need to get the colour profile for the camera. I found a whole bunch of them on the support CD that came with the camera. If you have the same CD as I, you'll find the ICC files at /SOFTWARE/DPP/program files/Canon/Digital Photo Professional/ICC If not, just search for any ICC file using find . -iname "*.ic*"

    Sensor F L N ntl P S std
    1021 •••• •••
    6001 ••• •••
    6011 •••• ••
    6021 ••• •••
    6031 •••• ••
    6041 •••• ••
    6051 ••• •••
    6061 •••• ••
    6071 •••• ••
    6081 ••• •••
    6091 •••• •••
    6111 •••• •••
    Table 1: The available ICC
    files on my support CD.

    I believe that the ICC files with names starting with numbers (for example 6051_ntl.icc) are profiles for various Canon cameras. The numbers probably refer to a sensor id and the letter refers (according to the profile titles) to profile type, for example L for landscape and P for portait. Put these profiles under one of the following folders: /usr/share/color/icc ~/.color/icc

    From my tests comparing JPEG images produced by my Canon 350D camera to JPEG images produced by UFRaw using the different standard (S and std) and neutral (N and ntl) profiles, I have come to the conclusion that there is no exact match (white balance, interpolation methods and more may differ). The best matches to the Canon 350D, however, seems to be 6111. Feel free to send an email with your comments on this.

    Peter Vermaas has a list of cameras with respective profiles on his page "ICC Color profiles for Canon Cameras", and he seems to agree with me regarding the Canon 350D. Visit his page for suggestion on profiles for other camera models.

  2. Install into one of the profile folders also colour profiles for working spaces, for example Adobe RGB, sRGB and ProPhoto, and papers. Some such profiles are available together with the camera profiles on your support CD, but you may also download some from these pages:

  3. To configure UFRaw to make use of your profiles, you first open the program with any raw image.

  4. Setup input profiles by clicking on the folder next to the input profile selector and chosing the different input profiles you may want to use in the future. Do the same thing with the output profiles. It is recommended that you use a profile for your screen while using UFRaw to adjust the picture and change to a working space profile only when exporting the image to file.

    Observe that you may only select a limited set of profiles, so choose only the profiles that fit your own camera(s). I personally have selected the files 6111_F.icc, 6111_L.icc, 6111_N.icc, 6111_ntl.icc, 6111_P.icc, 6111_S.icc and 6111_std.icc. Unset the colour matrix checkbox for the Canon profiles, but ignore the gamma and linearity settings for now.

  5. Click on options and select the configuration tab. From here you may save the current settings and as long as you have not fiddled with any control other than the profiles, the current settings should be fine as defaults.
  6. Close the program and open the file ~/.ufrawrc for editing.

  7. Add for each instance of Canon input profiles the following lines: 0.45 0.1]]> and check that your favourite input and output profiles are set as default.

    You may also set a custom name for the different profiles. Take a look at the profile names under the settings tab of the UFRaw options to see what the creator called the profiles.

  8. Save the rc-file and you're ready to go!