Camera Raw Profiles in ACR 4.5 and LR2

[TonyW]

There's an excellent video from Matt on how these work and what they do. I've been using the Nikon ones and like what they do but didn't quite understand what they are and how they work. Matt explains it very well (including where you get them from).

http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/2008/video-camera-profiles-for-lightroom/

Although he shows them in Lightroom they do work the same way if you have ACR 4.5 in PSE5 or PSE6 (or CS3 if you have it but not CS2)

Note that the video has that wierd Apple .m4v format and isn't recognized by Windows but download it and change the extension to .mp4 and it will run fine in Windows.

Tony

[dj_paige]

Thanks, Tony! This is great stuff, and certainly I can see the difference in my RAW photos immediately.

The stuff in the video about presets apparently only applies to Lightroom. In ACR 4.5/PSE apparently you can only have one "preset", which you would select from the little icon on the right in ACR that has a dropdown menu and gives you the choice "Save New Camera Raw Defaults". From then on, every raw file you open will have this camera calibration as its default.

I must say that before I downloaded these camera profiles, I could never get the green in my photos to look just right. Not any more!

[ATR]

Tony W

Thanks for the link. I have downloaded and watched it and am going to try to install and explore the profiles.

As for viewing the download, I have Windows XP Professional. When I double clicked the .m4v download, the podcast opened fine in iTunes. I found that both the .m4v and .mp4 versions could be opened with either iTunes or Quicktime. So, it is not clear why your download had to be converted to be opened in your Windows XP.

Thanks again for that very helpful link.

ATR

[TonyW]

Paige: Thanks for that tip about saving the new calibration in PSE6 as a new camera raw default - I was selecting the one I like every time and that does make it easier (I didn't know about the Lightroom trick either - and still haven't figured out if I can make my favorite one the default - I'm sure it's possible but I'm still learning Lightroom)

ATR: I did wonder about that m4v format - I think my system must be set up a bit differently or I'm missing a plug-in or update somewhere as I just got a message saying it was an unrecognizable format and MS had no suggestions on what program to use to open it - I guess MS doesn't want to know about Apple :D

One caveat is that I think only Nikon and Canon have profiles at the moment - I assume they will be adding others but I believe it does depend on the camera manufacturers providing info to Adobe and some may be more protective of their settings than others. But if you are ambitious you can make your own using the profile editor which you can find at the same link where Matt gets the profiles from. Haven't tried it so don't know how easy it is to use with a non-supported camera.

Tony

[Edmund]

Thanks Tony, I downloaded and watched. very informative and definitely will give us all a better starting point to edit with.
Eddie

[Edmund]

Not sure if this is correct but if you go over to the Nikonians or Nikon Cafe sites they all insist that Nikon Capture NX will give the best rendering of that Nikon RAW NEF file. These profiles seem to level out the playing field a little. I have noticed a apparent shift in colors when I go from NX to PS but figured it was due to operator error (ME) and or color space mis-management on my part. Even though I try and watch everything very carefully.
Eddie

[TonyW]

Eddie - I have done a bit of comparison of Capture NX (1.3) and ACR 4.5 color profiles - by having them on the same screen at the same time and they looked very close. I shoot my D80 in Color Mode IIIa and that's the profile that Capture NX applies when it opens it - that matches very closely the D2X Mode 3 profile in ACR - so close I can't see a difference. Mode 2 and Mode 1 are close but I can see slight differences. It's hard to compare the two because Capture NX applies some other defaults like noise reduction and sharpening - as does ACR but a quick look did suggest that the ACR defaults are more conservative than the Capture NX ones - I haven't bothered to change those because I prefer to adjust them separately.

Of course I guess how you define "best rendering" is a matter of opinion and personal preference :D. Matt seems to like vivid in that video - that looks much like Mode IIIa with Enhanced saturation in Capture NX with the D80 and I find that a bit too much :D

Tony

[dj_paige]

TonyW: that's useful information about how the different profiles compare to Nikon camera settings.

Regarding setting up a default profile, I have found that photos with lots of green foliage look better to me in D2X Mode 3, while most other photos look better to me Camera Standard. Nut hey, that's just me.

This is great stuff, I've spent way too much time playing with it today. Fortunately, the weather was fantastic so I also went out and took some photos today.

[TonyW]

Paige: If you want to spend some more time fiddling ;) download the DNG Profiles Editor and take a read of the instructions/tutorials here:

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/DNG_Profiles:Editor

Basically it lets you tweak an existing profile to suit your own personal taste in color rendering or roll your own from scratch. Haven't done one yet but at least it gives you some understanding of how it all works (and it does open up all kinds of possibilities for profile tweaking).

Tony