Adobe Camera Raw's Camera Profiles

[kkamin]

Under the 'Camera Profile' tab of ACR I see a list of profiles. I'm shooting with Canon so I guess this question is for people familiar with Canon profiles. I have:

ACR 4.4
Adobe Standard
Camera _______ (the 5 Canon profiles)


My default is 'Adobe Standard' and I like it as a starting point but 'Camera Standard' looks good too (a little punchier). What profiles do you prefer for portraiture, the Canon ones or the Adobe ones? What do you like about them? Why does Adobe supply one?

Thanks

 

[Garbz]

Nikon, Canon, Leica, Olympus, Sony, and every other company all have cameras which render colours differently. Just go to dpreview.com and check out the test shots at the GretagMacbeth ColourChecker Chart. The Adobe Standard profile was designed to make all camera photos look the way Adobe wanted them to look.

The Camera Standard photos (the 5 for your camera make) were designed because some people saw the differences between the camera JPEG and Adobe CameraRAW's default look and cried foul. These are a way to mimic what your camera's RAW processor would re-produce.

The ACR profiles are the legacy ones before the Adobe Standard and Camera Standard profiles were introduced.

I can't speak about the Canon profiles, but I must say I don't like the Nikon profiles. I never have. This is one of the reasons I switched to RAW in the first place. The photos my camera produced looked good but the differences between the colours were never right. I use Adobe Standard as my base profile, or at least I used to.

The Adobe Standard profile has long irked me in that it has a tendency to be unable to produce proper purple and yet adds a slight purple tint to skin tones on my camera. I tried shooting a UV light and it basically came out deep blue, whereas the camera JPEG for instance didn't have a bit of blue in it.

I have fine tuned the Adobe Standard profile to push deep blues towards the purple a bit more, and to add a bit of yellow / orange to skin colour. The tool for doing so is available from Adobe Labs and is called DNG Profile Editor.

 

[Big Mike]

In Lightroom, I will usually just try several different profiles and pick the one that works best for the shot (or the shoot). That's usually one of the first things I do, before adjusting the sliders for Exposure, Color Temp etc.

 

[davebmck]

I don't like the Cameras Standard profiles either for my Canon camera. I use the Adobe Standard as my starting point. I can tell you that the Adobe Standard profile is much better than the old ACR profiles.

I don't do portraits though, mostly outdoor stuff.

 

[Garbz]

I can tell you that the Adobe Standard profile is much better than the old ACR profiles.

Understatement

 

[Derrel]

I think Canon's DPP "Faithful"profile looks lovely. Why they call it "Faithful" is beyond me, 'cause it looks much better than reality, at least to my eye. ACR's defaults are not the way I want my 20D or 5D files to appear.

You know, RAW conversion software is tremendously varied in its complexity and final look. Just throwing this out there: have you ever tried the Japanese-designed SilkyPix RAW conversion software for Canon, or perhaps Bibble?

I think you might look into SilkyPix; it has perhaps the most-sophisticated highlight recovery capabilities of any RAW converter on the market, as well as incredible shadow recovery capabilities. This software was not designed by North American or European people--this is an application that has an entirely different appreciation for tonality and for color palette than the borg standard that is Adobe...

If you're looking for a RAW converter that can handle deep shadow values with nuance, and handle extreme highlights with nuance, for studio work, I think you owe it to yourself to investigate SilkyPix; they were the *ONLY* RAW conversion company to solve the difficult Kodak 14n and Kodak SLR/n and SLR/c raw conversion problems to the point of professional acceptability of the files. I'm just sayin...Adobe and Apple and Nik Software (Nikon Capture NX developers) are not the be-all,end all of RAW conversion software--they are the "Western World's" standards.

 

[Garbz]

Very interesting. I heard of SilkyPix several times before but this time I decided to give it a try. I must say I am incredibly impressed and very disappointed at the same time. Opening a RAW produced images that are almost exactly the same as my very adjusted camera profile in Lightroom, it looks a lot better than the default Lightroom profile for the D200 in my opinion.
But, and a very big but, It's interface must have been designed by a blind man, or a 2 year old or something. I have never used a more complicated RAW converter, and have never been lost enough to need to take a good 10 minutes to figure out how to even do basic adjustments. If the silky pix rendering were combined with a semi decent interface it would be great.