i did a bit of learning and research about this and how it differs from other offers from other approaches and here is basically came up with:
first of all: accurate != pleasant colors. while accurate may result to pleasant colors, it is not always the case. so spoiler alert to people who adjust colors heavily in post anyway, this is not for you.
note that a lot of what i'm going to say is based on what I understand with the help of AI and the internet. this is not a regurgitation of what AI says but are a result of my understanding. Take with a grain of salt anyway. also, a lot of these thoughts will be based around Lightroom.
- My initial question is how is this different from creating custom profiles with ColorBrite? The goal is somewhat the same, but the approach is very different, in favor of the Spectre. With ColorBrite you are relying on the 24 color swatches which leaves a lot to interpretation for colors in between; compare that to Spectre (and Leica embedded, more on that later) which use the monochromator (i.e., lab testing) there is no guesswork.
- the Adobe profiles (Color, Standard, Portrait, Vivid, etc) uses the Color patches that ColorBrite custom profile does (but with matching to camera sensors) which also puts the Spectre at an advantage.
- so what does this advantage mean actually IRL? you know when you adjust that white balance slider in LR heavily using the Adobe profiles there's this shit shift of colors? well there it is, you don't get that with Spectre (theoretically, anyway since I don't have their profile) since with Spectre there's no guessing how a sensor pixel with react to a color under a specific lighting (ie no interpolation)
- With Spectre, the thing is you think about a linear response (sorry couldn't think of a better term) that allows you to make uniformity across camera sensors...which also means that the Color science of manufacturers are essentially out the window...you can't have "Canon colors" when you are using this in conjunction with other cameras since you can't have both. the "S curve" is gone. Also, remember when i said "accurate" is not necessarily "pleasing?" yeah, that applies here now. I guess you can say that Cobalt is "less opinionated"
- So how does this compare to Hasselblad's HNCS? their approach is using (presumably) similar to Cobalt's but since they are only concerned with Hasselblad sensors, they have the property of being resilient to color shifts in post _but_ they apply their S curve...so in this case it is guaranteed that their color is pleasing at the expense of some accuracy.
- This brings me then to Leica's embedded camera profile to be used in Adobe... same lab-grade profile but with their (IMO somewhat strong) S curve, which to me is not always great for a lot of situations.
- BTW, only Leica's embedded profile can be considered a "true embedded" profile since they're using DNG...not to be confused with "camera profiles" in Adobe LR for other manufacturers like Nikon's because they are proprietary...i.e, the "Rich Tone Portrait" profile in LR is NOT the same as the RTP picture profile as Nikon describes it.
I still stand by what I have said that some things said by OP kind of rubbed me the wrong way--eg. stating that M240 got rid of IR contamination (not true) and the low-key dissing of Hasselblad colors and also seem to be deliberately avoiding my questions (why does the S3/Q3/Q343 have different rankings on their site when they are essentially the same sensor?)...that said, I am somewhat considering buying the Spectre profile for M11 if only to validate what I understand/learned...if it just wasn't so damn expensive.
Sep 07, 2026 at 10:45 AM
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