Sat, May 8, 2010
As with most professional photographers we shoot in RAW and we love the colors on the back of the LCD, just like you do. Many photographers get frustrated with RAW due to their colors not looking the same in Lightroom or Adobe Camera RAW. They have these beautiful photos on the back of the LCD. They can even see those beautiful colors in the thumbnails on the computer. But once they open them up, the beautiful colors disappear! Why? Profiles.
Some people nay say this, but it is essential to attaining profession color in your images. Here you can see the first image with the standard Adobe profile. The colors are drab, there’s no contrast, nothing. Why? Because each camera saves their color information differently. And each camera manufacturer has their own settings. Nikon has a portrait setting, neutral, vivid, etc. Unless you tell Lightroom or Photoshop what you want, it doesn’t know how to display the colors.
Now let’s look at an image with the Camera Vivid profile attached to it (Adobe’s profile to mimic Nikon’s Vivid setting – our favorite). I shot this image in manual exposure and other than setting the correct Camera Profile in Lightroom and sizing for the web, I’ve done nothing to it. Well, I softened the skin a bit, but the colors, contrast, etc. are literally straight out of the camera.
So, how do you do this? The good answer is pretty dang easy. Here you see the basic setting in Lightroom, the Adobe Standard profile. Under Camera Calibration in Lightroom, the Profile says Adobe Standard.
Simply select that Profile drop down menu and change it to the one you want. Do you like Canon’s Portrait profile? It’s a great one, then just choose Camera Portrait. I chose Camera Vivid for ours because it bumps up the colors but leaves the great skin tones that Nikon has.
You can also get a 24 patch color checker card and along with Adobe’s DNG Profile Editor you can create a custom calibration that will let your camera create more realistic colors in addition to tweaking the profile if you want to take it further.
Thank you for this information. I have used Lightroom for couple years now and have not heard about using the camera calibration section in the Develop module for this reason. Thank You again.
Glenda
Great tip – thanks! It would be nice if you could set the profile as default; seems to me that it defaults to Adobe Standard and I have to change it for everything. Thanks for the info!
CAn you do one on calibration of your screen and what you should then have your photoshop profile set too??? and where does ICC profiling come in? Thanks for helpful post.
You should check out the “passport”. Making a profile is as easy as exporting an image from lightroom. This has helped give me perfect color from the start.