Homemade camera profiles

Question

As an early adopter of DNG Profile Editor and user of the Chart Wizard for creating my D300 profiles for Camera Raw, I have used each successive version as it has been released. It worked quite well with my D300, and was a definite improvement over the profiles supplied with ACR, although I had to give it a bit of help with the values, by taking the mode of a few saturation readings and adding a bit of manual tweak to lightness.
I acquired a D800 in March, and headed outside on the first sunny day with the GM ColorChecker to take a few shots. I used the latest version of DNGPE to generate a camera profile, which seemed to be an improvement over Adobe Standard in terms of colour accuracy and balance. However, a couple of weeks later, I noticed some unpleasant banding on the boundaries between certain colours. I decided to sacrifice accuracy for aesthetics, and ditched the profile.
I guess that Chart Wizard isn't really accurate enough for my needs, or the patch transforms are so few and so extreme that it can't provide a smooth transition between some colours. Am I doing it wrong, or is this a known limitation?
Are there any plans for a new version of DNG PE? Is this the sort of question no one is allowed to answer?

Answer 1

I actually never really used DNG PE, but out of curiosity, tried making a calibrated profile for D800, based on Adobe standard and using a test photo that I got from one site with Macbeth on it, just to see how it works. Tried DNG PE .45 and .46 and results are indeed different - similar to what Yammer got with his test photos.
After examining the recipe files, my understanding is that for all patches in the chart there is a hue and saturation after applying base profile (SrcHue, SrcSat) in linear Digital photo pro. However, while hue values were similar with both versions, saturation was different - in case of .45 usually somewhat lower than on photo converted with ACR and in case of .46 higher. Which is a bit strange to me. These values are compared to correct values to calculate LUT for making a new, calibrated profile. So, calculated corrections for these colors (SatAdjust) are different for .45 and .46. One explanation could be an additional tone curve in the profile generated  with version .46, while profile generated with .45 has no tone curve,  meaning standard Adobe curve is used by ACR.
I understand that these values (SrcHue, SrcSat) are different for every camera, because in some cases Adobe standard profile does better and in some worse job (depending on the sensor and lens) + different lighting conditions, so for some cameras, two points can fall closer and for some cameras they won't be that close. However, it would be nice if algorithm for calculation of lookup tables can take care not to make things too abrupt, because except correcting the lighting, there is nothing user can do to obtain better result, except of course making manual corrections ... Also, I don't see any nonzero ValAdjust value in recipe files, and without correcting Value while making Sat and Hue corrections, it's very unlikely that resulting profile will perform well - there will be increased color noise / banding - at least it was always the case when I was playing with my own algorithms to do similar things ...