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Archive 2009 · Anyone here profile their cameras? Is it worth it?

SmegHead
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p.1 #1 · Anyone here profile their cameras? Is it worth it?

I've been reading a few books lately, in particular Skin that have sections dedicated to profiling your camera in Camera Raw. I found getting my monitor profiled made a HUGE difference to the quality of my prints etc. The authors that write about it certainly think it's worth while but it goes completely unmentioned in a lot of my other books.

Anyone here profile their camera? Do you find it makes a difference?

I don't really want to get into it as from what I've read I'd need to create profiles for each of my body/lens combination as each lens renders colour differently... this seems like a lot of work... but I'll do it if it's worth while.

Aug 08, 2009 at 04:06 AM

Hendrik
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p.1 #2 · Anyone here profile their cameras? Is it worth it?

Skin is a very outdated book and not very good to begin with.

Profiling your camera can give a slightly better color reproduction, but only if you shoot your subjects under exact the same lightning condition you used when you profiled your camera. I think it's not worth the effort. The profiles in LR or other RAW converter are already very good, the rest you can tweak without too much trouble. Remember, your camera (and your brain also) captures an illusion, there is no good color.

Aug 08, 2009 at 11:01 AM

SmegHead
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p.1 #3 · Anyone here profile their cameras? Is it worth it?

yeah... that's kind of what I was thinking. Sounds like a good idea if you did say... studio product photography with multiple bodies and lenses and the pics all had to turn out looking the same.

Aug 08, 2009 at 04:09 PM

howardm4
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p.1 #4 · Anyone here profile their cameras? Is it worth it?

I might try it w/ the DNG editor just to see & play what I get but I'm assuming that in reality, the effort and anxiety won't be worth the gain.

Aug 08, 2009 at 04:30 PM

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p.1 #5 · Anyone here profile their cameras? Is it worth it?

I have profiled my 5Dmkii with good results. All I have done is profiled it with my strobes because it is time consuming. Not really worth the time and effort to do all types of lighting, but it has helped a little on color reproduction.

Aug 08, 2009 at 05:42 PM

Hendrik
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p.1 #6 · Anyone here profile their cameras? Is it worth it?

btw, always using a white balance card is much easier.

Aug 08, 2009 at 07:24 PM

Mirek Elsner
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p.1 #7 · Anyone here profile their cameras? Is it worth it?

I have been profiling my cameras for ACR for quite a while. Now Adobe provided the DNG Profile Editor and made the process quite painless.

For the type of photography I do, I don't see any need for having profiles for different conditions. Sensors apparently behave differently under 5500k and 2800k, but profile made at ~5500k works well for everything I do . You can create dual illuminant profiles, if you want, having one profile that works well under whole range of illuminants.

Making ACR profile is easy, you only need the Gretag-Macbeth 24 color checker. If you need to buy one and find that you don't want to make your own profiles, you can still use it as a reference for quality of your color management etc., so you won't waste your money.

Make sure you lit the checker very, very evenly when making the test shots.

Aug 09, 2009 at 02:21 AM

butchM
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p.1 #8 · Anyone here profile their cameras? Is it worth it?

Mirek Elsner wrote:
I have been profiling my cameras for ACR for quite a while. Now Adobe provided the DNG Profile Editor and made the process quite painless.

+1 very pleased the the results.

Aug 09, 2009 at 07:05 PM

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p.1 #9 · Anyone here profile their cameras? Is it worth it?

+2, and you DO NOT need to shoot in exact same lighting. You only need to take a few precautions when shooting the color checker card.

Aug 10, 2009 at 12:04 AM

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p.1 #10 · Anyone here profile their cameras? Is it worth it?

I think that if you get the hang of the profiling procedure and practice it a few time, it becomes easy to whip out your Macbeth color chart and profile when desirable for specific lighting situations, especially where you want to match your shots.

Aug 11, 2009 at 12:30 AM

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p.1 #11 · Anyone here profile their cameras? Is it worth it?

Neumanns wrote:
+2, and you DO NOT need to shoot in exact same lighting. You only need to take a few precautions when shooting the color checker card.

The quality of light needs to be the same, color is not the same under all light sources.

... but then again I haven't profiled my camera's, so what I say is crap to begin with

I don't see any advantages. All my images are fiction to begin with. A white balance card and good converter is all I need and much easier for good colors.

Aug 11, 2009 at 01:19 PM

andrewfee
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p.1 #12 · Anyone here profile their cameras? Is it worth it?

I bought a ColorChecker recently and I find the results to be a huge improvement over ACR's included profiles.

Previously, I would try out a few profiles to see which looked best for an image and then almost always ended up tweaking colour further using the HSL controls in Lightroom.

Now I find that colour is a lot more consistent depending on the lighting and and that it's a lot more pleasing as well. I'm getting results that I don't think are actually possible just by adjusting the HSL controls, such as the way that different reds, yellows, oranges are all better separated/defined. The most I tend to do to an image with colour now is adjust saturation +/- 5-10 points, if anything.

Here's a couple of comparison images I posted a while back with all settings being the same, except the profile that's selected:

This image is copyrighted by the owner

Aug 11, 2009 at 02:05 PM

cgardner
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p.1 #13 · Anyone here profile their cameras? Is it worth it?

The thing you come to realize about color the more you learn to manage it is that the weakest link in the process control chain is human vision. Our vision is so adaptable that it will accept a wide range of color as seeming normal and will only detect small differences in side-by-side comparison, i.e.; pixel peeping.

For a museum trying to document an art work collection using a copy arrangement with consistent lighting conditions it would be worth the effort to profile the camera, but even then the lowest common denominator will be the gamut of whatever is used to display the photos on screen or in print and in many cases the gamut of the pigments used in the artwork might be outside the gamut of camera sensor.

Color management, as it was developed in the printing industry using analogue and digital methods, is focused on managing expectations. A classic example would be a photograph of red lipstick for a cosmetic ad in a mass circulation magazine. There is no way the inks on the web press can match the pigment of the lipstick. By viewing on a RGB monitor or printing on a 12 color ink-jet printer the photographer could get a closer match so show the client, but what the client really needs to know when approving the proof is what it will actually look like in the magazine. Using the profile for the press in a color managed workflow results in a proof on screen or in print which will be a closer match to the smaller gamut of the web press. In that example the color in the magazine would suck compared to the real lipstick placed next to it, but relative to all the other color in the magazine it will probably be the richest and most saturated red in the book and the viewer's perception of the color will adapt to the point they accept the illusion that the lipstick is really red, at least to the point they are motivated to go to the store and try it on.

In the type of photos we typically take the goals are different: tweeking as much saturation out of whatever medium is displaying the image. But even then perfectly neutral and technically accurate color is seldom the best choice perceptually. Perception is influenced by many factors one of which is context. In a conventional portrait neutral WB looks a bit too cool perceptually. But take the photo outdoors in the winter where you want to create the impression the person is cold and neutral WB will look too warm. Next time you watch a movie notice how skilled the cinematographers are at using the color temp of the lighting to key the emotional mood of the scene. Production designers go to great lengths to do that, coordinating the colors of the setting, clothing and lighting all to evoke whatever emotional response is desired in the mind of the viewer.

That's not to say profiling a camera isn't a valuable exercise. It will help you understand how the color management process works and its limitations. But in terms of the goal of evoking a particular emotional response in the mind of the viewers of your photo you'd be better off devoting the time to consciously understanding how various color biases in photo evoke different emotional responses like in the movies and how a color managed workflow will help you anticipate how the color will change when output and viewed different ways. That helps manage your expectations and keep them within the realm of what is technically possible

Chuck

Edited on Aug 12, 2009 at 05:25 PM · View previous versions

Aug 12, 2009 at 12:37 PM

Hendrik
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p.1 #14 · Anyone here profile their cameras? Is it worth it?

@cgardner

+1

Aug 12, 2009 at 05:09 PM

camey
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p.1 #15 · Anyone here profile their cameras? Is it worth it?

Similar experience here, after going through the whole nine yards with GM ProfileMaker 5.0 I concluded that images looked better before you start messing with profiles. About the only area I saw improvement was the GM Colorchecker DC chart. People in particular looked very dead after profiling and I also found that Photoshop doesn't deal with images if you leave them in the camera profile, you always have to convert back to a standard profile or the first time you apply another filter it will wreck the image.

Suffice to say I sold the entire kit as being an expensive waste of time and money.

Aug 12, 2009 at 06:44 PM

Sean Baker
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p.1 #16 · Anyone here profile their cameras? Is it worth it?

I found it to be worthwhile for my bodies, shooting both color temps for the DNG Profile Editor and creating custom profiles with the automated correction that way. I understand and agree with what cgardner is saying above, but I also know from experience that color casts from individual sensor variation can make achieving what he discusses more difficult than it needs be. So while it might not be worth it to buy a color chart and meter just to do this, if you already have all the pieces, it may be worth your time.

Aug 15, 2009 at 09:03 PM

Pavel
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p.1 #17 · Anyone here profile their cameras? Is it worth it?

I was getting quite different color results from two different D700 until I profiled them ... and now I can't find any difference between their output. Well worth the small effort. The results are very different than just white balancing as the relative colors shift dramatically with a custom profile.

Nov 14, 2009 at 02:58 AM

HerbChong
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p.1 #18 · Anyone here profile their cameras? Is it worth it?

with the ColorChecker Passport, it is much easier to create dual illuminant camera profiles. whether the results are worth it are still hard to say.

Herb...

Nov 14, 2009 at 05:46 AM

ModifiedPhoto
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p.1 #19 · Anyone here profile their cameras? Is it worth it?

I'm going to be testing and comparing the ColorChecker Passport this weekend (when mine shows up). I hope to post some comparisons to show how it works, if it works.

Though the advantage (assuming it works) would be that you could, in theory, profile multiple cameras to match each other as well as images taken with different lenses on the same camera or even with different make and model of cameras. For wedding shooters, this would be invaluable as the second shooter may (and likely is) using a different type of body and lens than the primary shooter.

I hope to have some thoughts and comparison on my blog by sometime this coming week.

Nov 14, 2009 at 06:54 AM

theSuede
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p.1 #20 · Anyone here profile their cameras? Is it worth it?

Getting EXACT colour is very seldomly what you want (and actually next to physically impossible for many reasons), but a well-built camera profile will give you correct distances between hues - and THIS is highly important no matter what type of photography you do.

There's a reason Canon skin-tones look the way they do. And there's a reason Nikon skin-tones are a little different. None of them are "right". And none of them can be made "right" by whitebalancing, as the reason for them being wrong is HUE COMPRESSION. If you take a colour scale that should be a continuous ramp from yellow to deep red, and shoot it with a Canon camera it will look something like this:

This image is copyrighted by the owner

This image is copyrighted by the owner

Even if the green and red primaries are reasonably correct, and well whitebalanced, results speak for themselves. The primaries are reasonably correct, but NONE of the hues in between are correctly placed.

Now for a 10s work corrected profile.

This image is copyrighted by the owner

This image is copyrighted by the owner

Now that's quite a difference. Its hard to precisely explain what this difference amounts to in real pictures if you're not used to colour-managed workflows and exact printing, but I myself notice a much higher "workability" in pictures with correct colour. You can do a lot more to/in them before they "fall apart" and start to look really artificial.

I think it's worth it.

Nov 14, 2009 at 09:16 PM

theSuede
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p.1 #21 · Anyone here profile their cameras? Is it worth it?

BTW, both the samples above are actual testshots sampled with Heidelberg Prinect software and original colour patches were measured with an industrial quality spectrophotometer, and translated into continuous tone wedges. The custom profile is not even very "sharp" as I prioritized usability over accuray in this one to make it more versatile. I could without any work at all make it a lot more exact.

Nov 14, 2009 at 09:26 PM

ModifiedPhoto
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p.1 #22 · Anyone here profile their cameras? Is it worth it?

Interesting comparison.

Nov 14, 2009 at 11:22 PM

theSuede
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p.1 #23 · Anyone here profile their cameras? Is it worth it?

What the comparison doesn't show you, and what most people don't (or can't) see is that this is not "solvable" by changing white-balance. In fact WB will make the problem WORSE in 99 cases of 100.

Skintones are situated somewhere to the right of the middle of the wedges above (but they are weaker - containing more pure white). We usually WB for the skintones if there are people present in the photograph.
In the uncalibrated wedge you can see that this means that you have to increase red and decrease green (same as lowering WB-temperature and adding a slight magenta "tint" on the second slider in most raw-converters). Now we have corrected for the skintones, they seem "real".

But what have we done to THE REST of the picture? We've increased red power over green to get the skintones "right". As an effect of this, red-orange will now be mostly red. Medium red will be strong bright red. Greens will be more bluish green.
Any Canon users recognize this scenario? :-)

Nov 15, 2009 at 05:55 PM

south
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p.1 #24 · Anyone here profile their cameras? Is it worth it?

For a little disambiguation: People are talking about two different profile types here: ACR camera profiles and ICC camera profiles.

ICC camera profiles are specific to the lighting, lenses, ISO, dynamic range of the camera. They're a capture state of the camera and scene. For this reason they're generally only useful that have an extremely controlled lighting and camera setup. If you change the light, you're changing the response of the color that the camera sees. This is fundamental. These profiles are created by shooting a ColorChecker (DC) and then running that photo through software such as GretagMacbeth ProfileMaker. An ICC profile contains tables of MANY color combinations. ACR profiles work quite differently.

Adobe Camera Raw profiles are not ICC profiles, though the process to create them seems very similar these days. In response to one poster, the reason for creating an ACR profile under two different lighting conditions (tungsten and daylight) is *not* because the sensor behaves differently under these two conditions, but because of the way ACR engineers chose to solve the large difference in color response over these two light sources. ACR interpolates between tungsten and daylight. This is great -- otherwise you'd be profiling for every single color temperature and every light source. Obviously not what you want.

My understanding is that by generating the ACR profile under these two lighting conditions, you're giving the ACR engine the information it was engineered to use. Unlike an ICC profile, you're not correcting for a multitude of color possibilities. You're telling the ACR engine what the response is to the red, green, blue primaries under two very different lighting conditions so that ACR can correctly correlate between the two.

Nov 15, 2009 at 07:10 PM

theSuede
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p.1 #25 · Anyone here profile their cameras? Is it worth it?

South: Yes they are (almost) totally different creatures, but you got it the wrong way. ICC is the more "handicapped" profile by a VERY long way. ACR (.dcp) profiles actually contain a lot MORE information (and more fine-grained too!) about what and where to correct in the colours than an .icc profile.

The dcp contains (optionally two of each, where you interpolate between the "low WB temperature" and the "high WB temperature" versions to get the values to actually use for shot):
A lighting matrix, a calibration matrix, a translation matrix, a "pre-exposure" colour-correction LUT of unlimited resolution, a "post-exposure" LUT of unlimited resolution (and a tone curve).
An .icc only contains three of these. Light, calibration and pre-exposure LUT (and a tone-curve).

And NO, the sensor actually behaves very differently if you compare 2800K light to 6500K light. The colours in between the primaries shift quite a lot, and the values needed to calibrate them "right" changes quite a lot. In 2800K light, orange needs to be shifted THAT way, in 6500K light orange has to be shifted the OTHER way if you want the correction to give you the correct colour - to use an easy example.

The ACR profiles are a lot MORE than the icc profiles. Icc profiles are meant for ONE media, under ONE restricted set of circumstances.

Nov 15, 2009 at 08:16 PM


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