Wow Guys. Thanks to Bruce and Jrfx. Those presets are exactly what I need. The lightroom preset and the Pkiss one are very similar. This will make editing so much easier for me.
I use that too, on every camera that I own. That is 6 this year alone, including 1 Nikon, 3 Canon, and 2 Sony.
. ColorChecker Passport
I started profiling all of my cameras about 8 years ago when I was shooting fashion. It is the **only** way to get back to square 1 to adjust from camera to camera and have controllable color from start to finish.
You can also take that same Color Checker image into the Adobe DNG editor.
That will allow you to tweak a number of parameters for each of the 24 squares on the Color Checker. Saturation, contrast, etc. etc.
Then just automatically apply that default profile in Lightroom based on camera serial number.
That is an increasingly important part of creating custom "looks" for video. Large or small tweaks to color, prepackaged, applied at processing time. Obviously there are a lot of different ways to do that, but this is the cleanest.
The one limitation of the DNG process is that it only uses 24 patches on the Color Checker.
There is a Color Checker Digital SG that I use to create ICC profiles with the Xrite i1 Pro package. That uses 140 patches, including some that require special; attention for digital rendering. That obviously offers much more potential control points.
FWIW, I agree with you on Canon skin tones being absolutely the best among many different cameras. Each camera is tweaked to a slightly different preference. I see the Nikon as trending green, the Canon a more pleasing red/yellow.
If you use some of the "scopes" from Adobe Premiere Pro for video processing, they have marks that graph the correct skin tone rendition of an average video file, so that you can compare your files mathematically, rather than visually.
What most people are responding to when they think of a cameras color is the sRGB JPEG defaults that the camera ships with. That is usually set up to please the novice. (Many people used to complain that Canon images lacked "pop" around the 10D timeframe.)
I set my default Canon Profile to "Neutral" (or Faithful), -4, -2, 0. That gives me the best histogram and the most representative LCD and JPEG image. It also helps to set the default rendition the way that I like it in Lightroom, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, etc.
Man, yeah, I had a lot of problems with Nikon too! Not necessarily the camera itself and it's profiles. Well, sort of. The auto white balance doesn't seem to be as good as the 5d mark III. Now, I want to qualify that.
Outdoors. Indoors it seems amazing. Outdoors it sometimes is a bit "off"...whether it is just what I'm used to or not, I don't know. However, I've gotten used to it. The other thing is that the camera profiles in camera raw are not quite...perfect. Sometimes in different lighting conditions they can have color casts that are difficult to remove...
But, I bought a qpcard and man...wow. Solves problems!