RE: Canned or custom camera profiles?
RE: Canned or custom camera profiles?
- Subject: RE: Canned or custom camera profiles?
- From: "Robert Rock" <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2006 15:54:21 -0400
- Organization: P. Chan & Edward, Inc.
...my two cents:
You seem to grasp profiles very well. I am in the printing business, but
also an advanced amateur photographer. With the exception perhaps of doing
high end archival photographic copying, creating transparencies of museum
paintings, or perhaps certain product photography, where an extremely
"accurate" recording of the subject is critical, it seems to me that the
majority of photographs are very subjective in nature, attempting primarily
to recreate a mood or even to exaggerate or enhance the subject. With the
former, where lighting can be very accurately controlled and maintained
(studio settings, for example), it certainly is advantageous to build a
profile for added control and accuracy. However, as you pointed out, that
profile is useless if anything changes (lighting, lenses, or camera
settings). With most other photographs, accuracy may not be what you are
after, but rather an artistic interpretation of the event, in which case the
RAW settings give you tremendous control over the image in nearly every
regard. What photograph have you ever taken that didn't improve with even a
slight tweak of color temperature, histogram tonal levels, saturation or
hue? If your goal is to reproduce a painting as it really is, then profiles
are in order. But if you want that sunset picture or portrait to have that
"wow" factor, throw away the profiles. Besides, you can do nothing to
guarantee that the conditions present outdoors when the profile was created
will ever be that way again. On the contrary with indoor controlled
lightning.
So, assuming you've already decided that you DO need a profile, without
question a custom profile is more accurate and advantageous than any canned
profile. Those canned profiles are great starting points, but you will
almost always want a program to edit (tweak) the profile if you don't care
to build your own. Nearly all major profile programs include a program in
which to edit your profiles, and there are also some very good standalone
programs for this purpose. If you make your own, just remember that if
ANYTHING changes, you'll need a new profile, just as you would if you were
to change inks or paper on a printing press.
So, unless you're shooting thousands and thousands of repeatable images like
"visiting Santa Claus" portraits or you're archiving your entire art
collection in a fixed lighting studio, I find that camera profiles are
generally pretty useless.
Bob Rock
-----Original Message-----
From: colorsync-users-bounces+bobrock=email@hidden
[mailto:colorsync-users-bounces+bobrock=email@hidden] On
Behalf Of Chris McFarling
Sent: Friday, October 13, 2006 2:46 PM
To: email@hidden
Subject: Canned or custom camera profiles?
I've been reading up on the subject of camera profiling to try to get a
better understanding of the current state of things. From what I gather it
seems there are two camps. In one camp are those who believe camera
profiling is more or less a waste of time and the Adobe Camera RAW workflow
is most effcient and effective. On the flip side are those who swear they
can achive better results with camera profiles and a conversion app that
supports them, such as CaptureOne. It seems there are compelling arguments
on both sides of the issue.
Without delving into that whole argument, I'm curious about the profile
based workflow, mainly in regards to CaptureOne. PhaseOne supplies many
canned camera profiles for use with it's software. If one is to use a
profile workflow, is it better to create custom profiles or do the supplied
profiles do an adequate job?
When talking in terms of printers or monitors it seems that the answer to
that question is almost always to use custom profiles over canned profiles
if you want accurate color. But I'm not sure if that same logic holds up for
cameras. Since a camera profile represents a specific set of conditions,
once you deviate from those conditions, the profile is no longer providing
the best result possible. With that in mind I come to the conclusion that if
you shoot under the exact same conditions as were in place when the profile
was created, then a custom profile could be of benefit. If your shooting
conditions differ from the profiling conditions, which for most users I
would suspect would be the majority of the time, then you'll be making some
corrections anyway so a canned profile may be just as usefull. Is there any
reason not to think that?
So would it not stand to reason then that shooting in CaptureOne with a
canned camera profile is nearly the same as bringing your RAW file into ACR
and processing it with ACRs built in "profiles"? In both cases the input
profile, whether it be an actual ICC profile in C1 or the equivalent of an
ICC profile in ACR, most likely does not represent the shooting conditions
so there's some inevitable user applied corrections in play.
Chris McFarling
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Colorsync-users mailing list (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
m
This email sent to email@hidden
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Colorsync-users mailing list (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
This email sent to email@hidden