Please bear with my novice approach as I'll keep sharing some of the things I can get hold of along my slow but steady route. I shared previously on how I could assign a custom camera profile into Photoshop at time of processing with Camera Raw. But this was not exactly what I wanted since I don't want to export my RAW to see them with the right colors. Over the week-end, I briefly tried two photo editors, or three I should say. It's not that I am not interested in independent developer's software, which can be very innovative, and most of the renowned photo editors started that way. But given that I can take one thousand shots or more on a one day outing or event—but sometimes none—, and since I like to spend my time taking photos, as much as I like working on them on a computer, I need to have something quick and functional to process the images. This is what made ​​me throw my heart on LightRoom rather than on Capture One five years ago. I'm still fond of LightRoom. It is probably the best editor for speed and ease. I like the interactive histogram, the choice of options in the synchronize menu, the dust removal tool, the local adjustments, the interface which remains easy to my eyes even on my new thin pitch monitor. LightRoom has been built for convenience and ease of use, and to deal with large photo librairies. Some other software seem built for refinement. Of course, the best photo editor is always the one one gets to know the best. So, I briefly checked the beta version of LightRoom 5. The canned Canon 1Ds3 profiles are more or less the same as in previous versions of LightRoom. I denigrated those generic DNG profiles in an earlier post, and I should probably rectify by saying that they are good for what they are intended for. They are averaged to match tens of thousands of cameras from different batches, produced over a five years period or more. Those cameras are themselves designed to produce out of the box visually pleasing or flattering images to casual photographers who know not yet much about photo editing, andto give good looks to young Japanese girls. So the problem lies perhaps not in those generic camera profiles, but rather in the fact that the possibility of making a custom camera profile is not fully integrated in those photo editing tools we use. We don't question the need to build a custom profile for any serious scanning work, and good scanners are delivered with a chart and a profiling software, but we keep using those less than average generic profiles for photography. Then I downloaded a trial version of Capture One. Having placed untouched previews from LightRoom and from Capture One side by side, there was not much difference. The way some of my images look in Capture One 7 is somewhere between Camera Faithful and Adobe Standard in LightRoom. Capture One proposes just one generic profile for the Canon, but it is quite usable. LightRoom offers a set, but one or two are acceptable and the others are, excuse me, crap or perhaps intended at another planet's people and landscapes. But Capture One has something very interesting to offer that LightRoom has not (yet?), and that's support for ICC profiles! It also offers an array of profiles, and amongst them a DNG Neutral profile and a Camera RGB profile. I don't know if that profile is intended for that use, but I exported the HCT target in the latest and could then build a wide gamut ICC beta profile for my camera with the BasiCColor Photoshop plugin. Placed in the recommended profiles folder, Capture One found it. The differences with the generic Canon 1Ds3 profile (or with LightRoom's Camera Faithful) is slight, but there is a world of difference to my eyes. It mainly corrects for that excess of yellow in skin tones I was complaining about, brings up better green, magenta and purple, and adds some gamma depth. From there, I could then explore some of the image processing features of Capture One, such as the way it deals with noise, the perspective correction tools, the RGB curves! and also the color editor with it's very selective handling of hues. I could for instance warm up the greenish-yellow from some fall foliage without affecting the green grass below, something impossible to accomplish in DxO 7 and only partially achievable in LightRoom. The highlights and shadows corrections, as well as the exposure and lightness algorithms, are very smooth — the result is a vivid but still very natural looking image, even though the edits were strong on that one. Well, I've got 59 remaining days to evaluate that soft. I'm not particularly seeking the very high end results this program is aimed at, since I'm not into studio or repro work. But if I can find my way to speed in it, I'd be tempted to switch, but that might bring another nightmare considering what should I do with the old LightRoom catalogs… DNG profiler put aside, is there a chance that LightRoom 5 will see the implementation of a true ICC profiles engine like there is in Capture One? Paul Schilliger