Tune color primaries

Color Primaries changes the camera’s basic color rendering. Use it when a camera renders a color slightly off, for example reds that lean orange, or to give a whole set of photos the same base rendering. It works like the Calibration panel in other editors.

The section applies to the whole photo, after the profile and before white balance.

Shift a primary

1. Open Color Primaries in the left column.
2. Under Red Primary, Green Primary or Blue Primary, drag Hue to turn that primary’s hue one way or the other, and Saturation to make that primary more or less colorful. The track under each slider is tinted to show which way it goes.
3. Under Shadows, drag Tint to move the deep shadows toward green (negative) or magenta (positive).

All seven sliders run from -100 to +100 with 0 as no change. The six primary sliders never tint neutral grays. Tint is the one that does, in the deep shadows.

Keep the result as a profile

If you want these settings to apply to other photos from the same camera, save them as a profile. See Save your Color Primaries as a profile.

Technical details: what the sliders do

Each primary is rotated around the gray axis of DarkRay’s working color space (ProPhoto RGB, in linear light) by its Hue slider, and its color part is scaled by its Saturation slider. At +100, Hue turns a primary by 15 degrees and Saturation changes its colorfulness by 90 percent. The three results form a 3×3 matrix that is corrected so neutral gray maps to itself exactly.

Shadow Tint is separate: it scales the green channel by up to 12 percent at ±100, fading out from black to the midtones.

There is no chromatic adaptation step. The camera’s white balance is already applied when the RAW is decoded.