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While catching up on my photo news this evening I came across an article at Inside Lightroom that caught my attention: Adobe Camera Raw profiling.Like many photographers who make the jump from Jpeg digital photography to RAW shooting I have for a long time enjoyed the extra flexibility that the RAW file format provides, especially when it comes to adjusting white balance and squeezing that extra half a stop of tonality from a blown out wedding dress. However (and this is a BIG however) until today I had never really taken seriously the drawbacks of RAW image editing especially one tiny crucial detail: Camera Profiles. Adobe camera raw in both Photoshop and Lightroom has to interpret the colour information from the RAW files it receives from your camera, such as Nikons .NEF's and Canons CR2's. By default Lightroom and Photoshop will interpret these based on the Adobe Camera Raw plugin's own profile calibrations ACR 2.4 or ACR 4.4 (and more recently for Photoshop CS4 owners the ACR 5.2 update, which can be found HERE) .
Having previously ignored these settings and oblivious to the comments of other Lightroom users who complained of dull oranges and muddy skin tones, I have for the longest time processed my Canon Raw files using the Lightroom 2 default calibration of ACR 4.4. From this point on however I will never make this mistake again. Out of curiosity I downloaded Adobes Beta camera profiles that they rolled out ahead of Lightroom 2.2. Using ACR4.4 as a base I compared a .CR2 file with the new beta profiles. The results where quite shocking to me, as the 100% crop comparison image below demonstrates:
*ACR 4.4 on the left and Camera Standard Beta 2 on the right*The blacks are blacker and the red and orange tones are vibrant and more saturated purely as a result of using a correct camera profile when managing these RAW files noise also seems to be reduced. Needless to say I will be editing all my images with suitable profiles from now on and will not overlook this incredibly important stage in my digital work flow any longer.
*Taken from a 100% crop of the same image this clip clearly shows the difference in black levels and saturation when using the Camera Standard beta 2 calibration*
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4 comments:
Hey Toby,
nice to see the comparison. I have been looking into this too and found interesting resources that you might like:
1- this is a website that explains how to get the color profile from Canon directly, taillored to your camera model: http://maashoek.nl/color_profiles.html
2- if you want to go the geek way, try making a personalised profile for your own camera: http://blog.pcode.nl/2008/11/color-profiling-your-own-dslr-redux
Thanks Mortimer thats a really useful tip, shame that the canon profiles cannot be opened in Lightroom, if they did this would solve all my problems.
A very useful post Toby - I had been aware for some time that the colours were far more accurate when using Canon's own DPP raw conversion software but the horrible interface and lack of creative control had always deterred it's use for me.
Most of the time I distort the colours heavily so this isn't as much of an issue but as you say it doesn't hurt to have more accurate colours as a starting point.
thanks for your comments guys, other than colour what i would also stress is that the tonal range of the images is vastly improved by the newer profiles especially in dark areas, black appear much darker and drastically less noisy as a result, i was amazed how much better tonal range the images had after re profiling, the artifacts in the darker areas of the image is really worth re-profiling for alone.
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