Re: ICC Profile location for PS RAW
Re: ICC Profile location for PS RAW
- Subject: Re: ICC Profile location for PS RAW
- From: Andrew Rodney <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2003 18:07:53 -0700
on 11/3/03 4:48 PM, Mark Buckner wrote:
>
I find the lack of support for camera profiles in Adobe Camera RAW to be
>
both interesting and disappointing.
Why? You don't need them with that mode of operation within ACR.
The idea of a profile is to describe the numbers you get so you can produce
an accurate preview and then, if necessary convert to another colorspace.
ACR does both. The numbers you see while in ACR are the numbers you get. The
color appearance you see in ACR is the color appearance you get after a
conversion from RAW. The file comes in tagged and off you go.
>
We
>
profile scanners, printers, etc. based on empirical data, then for cameras
>
we're back to a "make it look good to you" approach for cameras.
Not when we scan color negs. That hasn't stopped people from producing very
lovely scans (and before that analog prints). What's a color neg really look
like? Beats me. It's an ugly orange affair that's backwards. So what's a RAW
file look like? What are you trying to match?
For some types of shooting, you DO want to treat the image as you would a
transparency and a scanner. For studio and copy work, that's useful. If you
look at the cameras that ACR supports (almost all field cameras), you simply
use it as if you were shooting a color neg. Make it look as you wish on your
calibrated display and move on.
If with your field camera you want to buy an expensive target, expensive
software and take all the time to build a profile, by all means do so and
skip ACR. For virtually everything I've shot with my digital camera, that's
the last thing I want to go through. But if I were in a studio situation in
a controlled environment, I might go that route. But the camera I'd be using
would likely not provide a RAW option anyway (like a Leaf, Imacon, PhaseOne
back).
>
This system reminds me a bit of Knoll Gamma, from
>
which I thought long since moved on.
Not at all! Gamma was supposed to allow you to calibrate and profile a
display visually. Bad idea. You want the display to produce a setting and
resulting profile that is not only accurate to what aim point you're aiming
for but as important, you want that consistently, day in and day out.
You can take the same RAW file in ACR and produce different appearances each
day but as long as you, the user get the appearance you want, it doesn't
matter if it differs day in and day out. It's not about matching or
consistency. It's about "editing" a raw file to get the appearance you wish.
ACR doesn't pretend to be a solution for all users working with RAW files.
But it makes a great deal of sense, it's fast, inexpensive and works well.
You can use other products to pull an image from a RAW file and if you
really feel you need to produce profiles for whatever reason, then ACR isn't
the right tool for you. But that it doesn't use custom camera profiles
(which can be a total bitch to make), doesn't mean it can't produce really
good results for the user.
Andrew Rodney
http://www.imagingrevue.com/
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