Camera profiles

[Snakepottery]

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Hi,

 

Can anyone enlighten me please on camera profiles? Particularly in relation to using them in LR2 (and 3). I presume my M8 has an embedded profile like Adobe 1998 or am I talking rubbish?! Is there a profile I download in the same way as I would an ICC profile for my printer?

Confused!

 

Thanks

Andy

[Snakepottery]

Thoight I'd better do a quick forum search just in case the answer is at my finger tip. There are references to profiles but having read the threads I'm still none the wiser! Doh, I must be more stupid than I thought!

[LondonM]

Would like to know how that works too. When I use the Huey Pro, it saves a monitor profile in Library/ColourSync/Profiles on my Mac. The camera profiles must be somewhere too. I know for Macs they are part of the OS, but they still must be somewhere.

[archi4]

Andy, It's late here in Holland, so I will try to give a short answer now.

Lightroom does not use icc or icm camera profiles.

It has it's own camera profiles which you can find in the develop module under Camera Calibration by using the roll down menu next to "profile"

If none of the shown profiles suits your taste, you can make custom camera profiles using a MacBeth color chart and the x-rite program called Color Checker passport or using the Adobe DNG Profile Editor.

If you use a Mac the profiles should be placed in:

user/library/application support/Adobe/Camera Raw/camera profiles/

Hope this gives you enough info to do a search in this forum. I am heading for bed now!

regards,

Maurice

[Snakepottery]

Thanks maurice.

 

That clears up a lot! I presume then that Leica don't supply camera profiles as such? I know with my Nikon D200 I can set the camera profile to one of about 3 or 4 not sure if the M8 has a similar setting. Didn't notice it but then wasn't really looking for one! I shall experiment and see.

 

many thanks

[adan]

Snakey - to clarify, Adobe 1998 is a COLOR SPACE, not a profile (sRGB, ProPhoto RGB and BruceRGB are some other color spaces).

 

The analogy would be that a color space is like a room, and a device-specific (camera, printer, monitor) profile is like the arrangement of furniture within that room. One can confuse the two, since they are described using similar parameters (white point, black point, and x, y, and z values for the 3 primary colors (RGB), just as one can use feet or meters to describe either furniture or a room - but they are not really interchangeable concepts.

 

Leica does supply ONE profile with their cameras - EMBEDDED in the dng file (and presumably the same one the camera uses to create jpegs.) If you want to see how it looks, go to the "calibration pane" in LR, select "Embedded" from the pull-down menu, and then make sure all the sliders are zeroed out. That will then be Leica's default profile - their idea of what accurate color from a specific camera should look like. Assuming correct white balance, which is a separate issue.

 

Since it is embedded directly in every image file, it won't show up as a distinct file in libraries.

 

If you use the "Adobe Standard" profile (also in the pull-down menu) with all the sliders at zero, you will see what the Adobe engineers think is accurate color - the "right" arrangement of the furniture. The "Adobe Standard" profile for the M8 and M9 does show up in the Adobe Library as Maurice describes.

 

You can use the sliders to make further adjustments on top of Adobe's or Leica's profiles. To be objective, you would take a picture of a MacBeth ColorChecker, and then adjust the hue and saturation sliders for each primary color until the red, green and blue patches of the ColorChecker (as measured by the eyedropper tool) match the published values those colors are supposed to be for the color space you've picked to work in.

 

And save those settings as a "preset" - that preset would then be your own personal profile for that camera. Those presets are saved as .xmp files with whatever name you save them with, in

 

Users/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Camera Raw/Settings

 

Ideally, you can, and in fact should, make separate profiles for different kinds of light sources. The imbalance in different light wavelengths (from pure sunlight) will skew how colors are rendered, even if a global white balance is achieved. A good profile neutralizes that skew.

 

You can also build biased profiles - i.e. for use with landscapes you could bias greens towards cyan and away from yellow (at the expense of more magenta reds) - and blue skies towards either purple or cyan (as your taste demands) - and then save that as yet another calibration preset (.xmp file), to be applied to specific landscape photos.

[sandymc]

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If you want to see how it looks, go to the "calibration pane" in LR, select "Embedded" from the pull-down menu, and then make sure all the sliders are zeroed out. That will then be Leica's default profile - their idea of what accurate color from a specific camera should look like. Assuming correct white balance, which is a separate issue.

 

Andy, to be pedantic, not that it actually makes a significant difference, the embedded profile is (or at least should be) developed taking the LR/ACR default settings, notably the tone curve, into account........

 

Sandy

[Snakepottery]

It seems like I need a MacBeth colour chart if I'm to do it correctly and accurately. Sounds like a job for a quiet weekend! Interesting though. I've never really got to grips with colour spaces and profiles. Starting to make a bit more sense with Andy's description of a room and furniture within. More research I think.

 

Snakey!! I like that! I shall make it my Nom de Plume!

 

Thanks all

 

Andy

[thompsonkirk]

Instead of matching all of the color-match patches to their RGB numbers, you can download the Adobe Camera Profiler, which does it automatically. You can take 2 shots, one with north light & one with a tungsten bulb, & the Profiler will interpolate between the 2 shots to build profiles that are (pretty much) accurate for all light conditions.

 

The Profiler instructions are absolutely correct but I found them hard to follow. Be patient & it will work for you.

 

If you're obsessive-compulsive (like me), you can even make a profile for each of your lenses. I did this because some of mine are new, some old, one is Zeiss, & one CV; & I'd noticed some differences in color balance between lenses.

 

Kirk

[Snakepottery]

Thanks Kirk. I do OCD very well!!

[wda]

Thanks maurice.

 

That clears up a lot! I presume then that Leica don't supply camera profiles as such? I know with my Nikon D200 I can set the camera profile to one of about 3 or 4 not sure if the M8 has a similar setting. Didn't notice it but then wasn't really looking for one! I shall experiment and see.

 

many thanks

I have much to learn myself in this area. However I believe that whereas generic profiles can be quite accurate, camera model specific profiles may be even more accurate which is why producing an individual profile for your camera should give you optimum results. Having said that, I have used LR for some time and have been remarkably pleased with the raw conversion carried out on my Digilux 2, M8 and X1 raw files. I have often wondered whether LR reads the EXIF data and modifies its conversion accordingly. Probably wishful thinking on my part.

 

Even without the advantage of individual camera profiles, you can fine tune LR's results and save the details as a preset which you can apply at the time of importing your files from the SD card.That not only saves time but leads to greater consistency of results.