Understanding and using Camera Profiles for Image Editing
This week, we are discussing an oft-overlooked feature of some RAW editing software tools: Camera Profiles. Camera Profiles establish the initial color and contrast “look” of your images, and you can use them in both creative and technical ways. For example, using a low-contrast profile can help recover shadow and highlight detail in otherwise tricky images. You can use creative profiles to emulate the look of film.
Color infrared image captured with a Nikon D700 and processed in Lightroom 5 and Adobe Photoshop CS6.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom does not handle RAW images captured with an infrared (IR) converted camera well by default. The problem lies in the white balance settings, which can be a real challenge to get right. However, you can work around this problem by creating a custom camera calibration profile using Adobe’s DNG Profile Editor software. The custom profile will let you have the necessary latitude to correct the WB setting in your IR images for further processing.
Here’s the whole process explained in a brief video that I put together:
