Saw some chatter on the Z9 FB group regarding the camera matching profiles in Lightroom vs Adobe Standard. I've always just used Adobe Standard, but after playing around, I can say the Nikon camera matching profiles are REALLY GOOD and you should take a look to see if there's value in your workflow.
Here's just one example where I would have had to edit my way around the Adobe Standard to get the skintones back to normal, vs Nikon Portrait which required no further edits. You can see how ashy the skintone is in the Adobe Standard.
Yes, I always start at Camera Flat. You can set your preferred profile in-camera and then set LR to apply the camera profile to the raw file on import.
Alistair1 wrote:
Yes, I always start at Camera Flat. You can set your preferred profile in-camera and then set LR to apply the camera profile to the raw file on import.
The other reason to leave your in-camera profiles to flat is to keep your histograms accurate - they are made from the JPEG.
As for the profiles, I have the best luck making my own profiles with a Colorchecker, which is very easy to do, but does require a small amount of effort to make them so it may not be everyone's first choice. I will say the Z9 files are noticeably more accurate to begin with than my D850 files and the corrections being made are more subtle. Nice to have the automatic Nikon profiles in LR too, back in ~2019 LR/PS gained the ability to read the metadata in the NEF files properly and can now reproduce the Nikon profiles more accurately than before so you don't have to suffer through NX-D haha.
Going back to some older shots just to see the difference...been curious why some of my landscapes had a flatness I couldn't really explain. The Nikon profiles help pop the color without any slider fiddling.
You can see the yellow of the straw and red of the crane's face pop a lot more in Nikon Standard here...feel like a dummy for just now realizing this, but hopefully someone learns from my mistake
I too much prefer the nikon profiles over the Adobe. However I like the Huelight profiles from Color Fidelity even more. I've been using those since about 2015 with my Olympus bodies.
Saw some chatter on the Z9 FB group regarding the camera matching profiles in Lightroom vs Adobe Standard. I've always just used Adobe Standard, but after playing around, I can say the Nikon camera matching profiles are REALLY GOOD and you should take a look to see if there's value in your workflow.
Here's just one example where I would have had to edit my way around the Adobe Standard to get the skintones back to normal, vs Nikon Portrait which required no further edits. You can see how ashy the skintone is in the Adobe Standard.
