Creating your own LR Profile (1 Viewer)

After seeing some examples on PotN, I decided to try creating my own profile for my 7D for Lightroom processing. So I splurged out £75 for the ColourChecker Passport. This is a small plastic box that folds out to reveal two colour charts and a white balance target. Also included in the software for creating a profile for your camera.

I used the Lightroom plugin, which made the whole operation wonderfully simple. You just take a raw image of the colour chart, import it into LR, then Export it using the X-rite plugin. Attached are two images of the same raw file. The top one is using the 'Camera Standard' profile in LR3B2. The bottom is using my profile. As you can see, there are diffrences in the colours produced. If you've got a colorchecker chart (and a calibrated monitor) you can check for yourself (if you haven't then you'll have to take my word for it) that the lower image's colours are much more accurate.

I've always found it frustrating, trying to find one of the supplied profiles that gave good colour rendition. Now I've got something that should always produce the correct colours from my camera.

Very interesting, i always find profiling to be a complete minefield, and never get the same results twice, for example, profiling can be seriously affected by ambient light temperature, doing it in the morning using daylight will produce completely different profiles to the same image in the afternon, so how do you account for that when trying to attain correct colours, i have never been able to figure that out ?

I have a calibrated monitor, and my printer is calibrated to that, so what i get printed is what i see on the monitor, but, on my monitor, in your profile image , to me, the top image has more correct colours, except for the white and reds, they look better here in the lower image.

In no way am i saying yours is wrong, or mine is right, just trying to highlight the potential minefield when profiling. Thanks for posting.

Frank's, second version is nearer to reproduction values, it will produce a cyan cast in the highlight.

The first is pretty good for the web.

Frank's given you all a near perfect test swatch to correct all your images to.

Stephen Fletcher said:

Very interesting, i always find profiling to be a complete minefield, and never get the same results twice, for example, profiling can be seriously affected by ambient light temperature, doing it in the morning using daylight will produce completely different profiles to the same image in the afternon, so how do you account for that when trying to attain correct colours, i have never been able to figure that out ?

Click to expand...

I shot the target using natural light (with moderate cloud) as that's how I'll be shooting most of the time. The plugin does allow you to create what they call an 'adaptive' profile by shooting the target under two different light sources. No idea how that's supposed to work, but it's the next thing for me to check out.

But the process is so stupidly easy, and the Passport is so easy to carry about, that it would be very little hassle to take a shot of the target each time you're keen on getting totally accurate colours.

Thanks Frank and Pe'rigin, always a contentious issue with web displayed images as opposed to printed ones.