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Adobe Custom Profiles

Bob

Administrator
Staff member
I was tipped off by member Jonathan Delacour about Adobe's DNG profile editor, so I thought I would take it out for a spin.
The following three images are from the same D3 NEF FILE.
First ACR 4.4
View attachment 8774
Next Adobe Profiles Beta 2
View attachment 8775
Last, A custom profile made with Adobe DNG Profile Editor
View attachment 8776
The custom profile produced markedly better results of a color checker image. It seems that the Adobe profiles were produced with lighting that might have resulted in a bit of specular reflections since I could nearly reproduce the results with more axial lighting.
-bob
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Bob, care to walk folks through the steps to create the custom profile?
 

jlm

Workshop Member
must be too much bourbon last night, but my eyes don't see much diff among the pics
 

Bob

Administrator
Staff member
Jack,
There is detailed documentation at the Adobe Labs site at http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/DNG_Profiles:Editor.
You can start from an existing profile or you can start from a ColorChecker card.
In my examples I used a ColorChecker illuminated copy-board style with flash.
The image below shows the differences between the ACR 4.4 profile for the Nikon D3 the the custom profile I produced.
The image is using both profiles, with the Custom profile revealed in the lower right quadrant of each color square. Note that the grays and flesh tones are very close, but reds and purples have been desaturated in the ACR 4.4 profile.
View attachment 8777
-bob
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Bob:

I used to build correction adjustments by hand for ACR shooting a McBeth and then tuning the colors but these were not profiles per se, rather camera-specific per-channel HSL adjustments. They worked well, but the process was arduous.

By contrast, I understand the new process is somewhat automated? My real question is does it load an actual profile, or is it another camera-specific set of HSL correction adjustments?

Cheers,
 

Bob

Administrator
Staff member
Jack,
The Adobe DNG Profile Editor seems to work a little bit like Rag's scripts in its use of a ColorChecker but is lightning fast and far more capable. What it generates is a substitute ACR-style profile that is used instead of the profile sets that come with ACR. I say ACR-style profiles since they are NOT icc profiles per-se, but are color-table based with support for cameras that are sensitive to illuminant changes. It basicly profiles 2850 and 6500 degrees K and interpolates between the two based on the specific image's whitebal seting. I think that it uses the same kind of color table suport technique that a camera can embed in a dng.
It also has a feature called a recipe. With a recipe, you can base a profile on something you might already be using, then tweak it according to taste, say deep IR whitebal normalization or perhaps some other tweaks designed to produce a "look". That recipe can be saved and then applied to existing profiles for other cameras to generate camera/look specific combinations. That allows one to copy the look across cameras without tweaking each one.
Pretty cool for the inveterate tweaker!
-bob
 
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