New Nikon camera profiles

Eric Chan a while ago posted some new camera matching profiles for certain Nikon cameras. My D300 is one of those. These fix the highlight rendering issues I identified before. I beta tested them a while before they were posted and they are great. Below is an example where it really matters. This is a waterfall I photographed shortly after sunset last weekend. Development is completely standard, except for choosing the camera standard profiles. This image was taken in Eldorado Canyon State park. Click on the image to get a larger version. Focus on the highlight detail in the snowy bank just right of the middle


Nikon D300, ISO 200, 62 mm on Nikon 55-200 f4-5.6, f/16 2.5 sec - tripod.

The left image is the standard camera standard profile in Lightroom. The middle image is the v3 camera standard with -0.5 exposure compensation as required to get the correct rendering. The right one is the Capture NX rendering. You can see that the old profile washes out the highlights quite badly, while the new profile, similar to the CNX rendering gives a lot of detail in the highlights. You cannot correct the left image with highlight recovery or negative exposure compensation and get this detail back.

Of course, the bland, default rendering is not how I develop the image in the end but I just wanted to illustrate the effect of the new profiles.

EDIT. Here is a closeup of the v2 and v3 renderings in the highlight area. The effect is quite major as you can see.

Lightroom 3.3 and lens profile downloader

Tom Hogarty from Adobe has announced that Lightroom 3.3 is available from their research labs site. It fixes one bug that annoyed me for a while, which is that if you are still using PS CS4, Lightroom would not offer to render as a tiff. This meant that "Edit in PS" would not render the lens correction adjustments built into Lightroom 3. Another thing that Adobe did was to make available a standalone app to download lens profiles from their server. This includes lots of community profiles for lots of exotic lenses. Previously, you had to use PS CS5 to download the profiles. I noticed that all the ones I created and submitted are in there and are highly rated. Making profiles is very easy and my geeky nature couldn't resist generating profiles. One example is a profile for my highly valuable Tokina 11-16 mm lens generated on my D300. You no longer have to email me to get it, but you can download it directly from Adobe! It works great.

A word of caution on using custom camera profiles

If you own a colorchecker, you can use DNG profile editor, or X-rite's passport Lightroom plugin to create a custom camera profile for your camera. This works really well. I should however caution you about an issue I discovered with this. One of the problems is that neutrals are not kept neutral when you change to a different camera profile in Lightroom or ACR. An illustration is given below.



On the left is the result of first assigning my self-calibrated profile generated using the passport plugin (this is also true for other profiles) and then using the white balance dropper on the neutral patch on the card and on the right is the result of first setting the white balance and then assigning the exact same profile. As you can see on the right, my very neutral grey backdrop turns green and the girl's skin is rendered a little too yellow. The skin tone might not be too bad but the green backdrop is very distracting I think. On the left, the color is just fine, no tint to the backdrop and good skin tone. The difference is simply in the white balance chosen by the white balance dropper. The image on the right, Lightroom chose 5700K and -3 tint, while on the left, it chose 5450K and +12. Quite a difference for white balancing on the same patch! I tested with all the other camera profiles and they all show this problem that there is a shift in the color temperature taken from the neutral patches.

P.S. if you prefer slightly more warm skintones than the very neutral rendering you get when using the neutral patch, the passport has a set of warming patches in the top row. You can simply select patches more to the right of the standard patch to warm up skintones. This results in the backdrop staying far more neutral but just the skintones warming up. A far more pleasant effect. See below for the result of choosing the patch two spots to the right of the neutral patch (the middle one in the top row of neutral patches. The second row of neutral patches also allows you to go to cooler colors and is more useful for landscape photography.



This made Lightroom choose 6000K and +27 tint. The skintone that resulted is very nice I think.

Conclusion: do your custom white balance after assigning the profile you want to use.

EDIT: It appears that this is mostly a problem with self-created dual illuminant profiles. I create these by shooting one image under tungsten light and another in sunlight as I don't own a calibrated D65 reference. Whether I create the profile in X-rite's passport program or DNG PE, they show the issue of neutrals not staying neutral. The Adobe-supplied camera-matching profiles also have the problem, but it is too minor to worry about. The differences in grey-card set white balance are on the order of 100K which you won't really notice.

Camera profiles

I wrote a little piece for inside Lightroom on the final release of the camera profiles. Check it out here. I gave some examples on how the camera-matching profiles can often give you very good starting points for developing your images. Here is another example. This is a shot I never looked much at from Monument valley. It was quite hazy and my camera's command dial was shot because of a car incident the previous day. The ACR default rendering is quite boring and the colors are just completely weird explaining why I never paid much attention to this image. Nothing like what I saw over there. Hover over the text links to see the result of different profiles applied to this image. It sometimes takes a little time for the images to load initially, so be patient.

ACR 4.4 (the default profile for the D50)
camera standard
camera neutral
camera portrait
camera landscape
camera vivid
camera vivid with some optimizations


The last version shows the result of some minor changes to the development using the vivid profile. Mostly just black level increase and a white balance change to get some more magenta in the sky (as I observed when I was there). Clearly, these profiles are very useful even if you're not as bad of a color junkie as I am.

Lightroom 2.1

Yeah! Adobe put out the final version of Lightroom 2.1. Mac version here. Windows version here. This update fixes many bugs that were present in 2.0 and is definitely worth it. Some things were already fixed in 2.1 RC, but this introduces some extra fixes and it's quite a bit faster than 2.1 RC letalone 2.0.
At the same time, Adobe released beta 2 of the camera matching profiles. These profiles are superb and they fixed some small issues in the highlights and other things. Definitely get them as fast as you can. The profiles are superb.

Lightroom 2.0

Lightroom 2.0 was released yesterday and I immediately downloaded the upgrade even though I have been very very busy with other things. Let me say that I am quite astonished by the release even though I knew what was to be expected in this. Just a list of things I was hoping for and whether they are in LR 2:

- electronic grad ND filters: One of the few reasons I have to go to Photoshop stil and a very longheld wish of mine. check
- Paint-in adjustment masks for exposure, sharpening, saturation, etc. check
- export to arbitrary color profiles in the export dialog: check
- pervasive output sharpening: check And it is superb!
- Better color rendering for reds, yellows, and oranges: check if you use the beta camera profiles. More on this later and why this is so exciting.
- Print to jpeg: check! It now even copies over the copyright notice into the metadata!
- Better file organization: check

Stuff that didn't make the cut but that I'd really love to see:
- Soft proofing. Obviously this is a major wish. This is hard to get right though.
- Book making facility. This is one area where Aperture really shines.
- Built-in backup facility.

About the new DNG profiles. I think this is a major advance that cannot be underestimated in its importance. Lightroom and ACR always had this issue where you could not get both skin tones and reds and yellows right at the same time without resorting to tricks. These new profiles provide beautiful colors and provide color rendering (if you like that) very close to the camera jpeg.

Here is an example: Young photographer loves colorful flowers:

This is the ACR 4.4 default rendering:


This is what people complain about. Ugly skintones, dull yellows and reds, etc. In this case, the image appears underexposed too, which it really wasn't

Compare this to the default Capture NX rendering (same as the camera jpeg)


As you can see, far better skin tones and more accurate yellow.

This is the rendering with the camera default beta profile:


That is superb. Great skintones and beautiful yellow. The yellow is actually nicer than in the CNX image.

Now to really optimize this, I used the camera vivid profile and increased the vibrance and saturation to 10 to get this image:


This really exemplifies the almost fluorescent quality these flowers had in real life. It also gives the nice warm tones that were present in the sunset light, even when using the daylight white balance! The difference with the ACR4.4 rendering is stunning. I'd recommend anybody to download the new profiles and try them out! I have to stress here that apart from slightly nicer reds and yellows, it makes very little difference for my D300. The difference with my older D50 (images above) are very large as you can clearly see.