Since I bothered you all with my posts lately, I want to report some good news, to balance my whining about the lost heritage! You might laugh at me for my late findings but that is alright. It has been many years since I knew that I could make a specific profile for the digital camera. I even knew that I could use my scanner calibration gear to do that. Don Hutcheson had given me a hint on how I could do it. But not knowing how to handle that thing properly and probably scared by my lack of knowledge, I always procrastinated. But lately, after upgrading to LightRoom 4.0, I was so annoyed by the changes. The default settings in the 2012 process make my portrait images appear as washed out parrots splashed with apricot juice (where did I find that??). I believed that I needed to do something to improve the workflow. I could have taken a plunge into LightRoom's literature, but I decided to start building my own camera profile instead (for Canon 1Ds3). Again, not knowing a better way, I taped the HutchColor HCT Velvia target onto a daylight light box, and shot it with camera set to daylight, Adobe RGB, linear gamma and faithful colors. I opened the RAW in Camera raw, no end points correction, linear contrast, white balance "as shot", camera faithful profile, and saved it as 16 bit TIFF file in the Prophoto space. I suspected that some minor problem would arise from the mismatched in-camera Adobe RGB space, but it seems not to bother the process. I then tried the RoughProfiler software from José Pereira, suggested by one of the regular contributors. Being plain novice, I loaded the chart and the reference file, and left every slider and box in the default position. Well, the profile I could produce is posterized and useless, but again, it's most certainly due to my lack of knowledge. There are many options that require a deep understanding of what one is doing in that little piece of software. Put away, but not yet desperate, I dug out the old G4 that runs a copy of BasiCColor Scan+, which I used for my scanner profiling, and ran the plugin on the chart. It's no brainer since there are no options at all. All you can do is load both files, place the pattern on the image and name your profile. I picked the profiles created (I made one for the Nikon too) and installed them into the other computer where I could open some RAW files in Raw Converter. Again: linear, camera faithful, white balance as shot and saved as 16 bit TIFF in Prophoto RGB. Then, in Photoshop, I assigned the new profile I had thrown together in a matter of minutes with BasiCColor Scan+, instead of Prophoto RGB. I was expecting to see the results of my hasty move, but… WOW!!! The dull images turned into perfectly color balanced, gamma optimized, almost finished images! They were not the whishy washy digital shots I was used to deal with, they were the Fuji Velvia shots I used to contemplate on my light box in another age! Skin tones are rich and spot on, grey is grey, green is green and blue is blue… For a first attempt, the results are far above my expectations. I think I could beat myself to death for not having taken that move earlier. When I think of all the time and effort I have wasted over the years, trying to tweak the colors and contrast curves in LightRoom, for results that have always left me only half satisfied… Photographers, make yourself a favor : If you haven't already, build yourself you own camera's profile. Now, the moment of truth will be when I shoot a color chart and check the results, and there is certainly room for fine tuning and to make it even better. Perhaps, even make a set of profiles for different corrections. But having the right colors and grey balance at the start is already an invaluable asset. Any guideline as how to have more control over the process will certainly be useful to me and to others, if you wish to share your way of doing. I had to process the RAW files prior to seeing the right colors, and I wish now that there was a way to make a profile that can be virtually assigned directly in LightRoom, in place of the generic canned profiles. Do you know if that is possible? (I mean, possible, even for me?) Paul Schilliger