First of all thanks to Jason at Canon blogger for his post on this topic (click here to read his post). So what is this new feature in Camera Raw, you may be asking. Well its a new thrust from Adobe in recognition that the camera specific raw converters were apparently getting a better colour rendition than the Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) application. The reason for this was the specific profiling for each particular camera. The response has been the development of a raft of camera profiles built for specific models of cameras.
The Camera Profiles is still in a beta version and can be downloaded from here, you can also find out more about the Camera profiles as well. You must have ACR 4.5 or later for this to be able to be installed and run successfully from ACR.
Once installed in ACR, you should see the new options under the camera profile tab in ACR. Now if you are like me, you may be asking at this point I don’t want to use the generic “Camera XXXX” I want to use the one specific profile for my camera. Well this is where a hint of genius and in my opinion bad user interface mix together to achieve what you would want without telling you. The truth as far as I understand it is that ACR determines the camera model via the EXIF and then loads the approriate profiles into the camera profiles listed. So for instance when you read Camera Faithful beta 2 it means for me Canon 20D – Faithful image style (if you want to read more about image styles for Canon cameras then click here).
For more information on the Camera profiles plugin read the Adobe FAQ’s here.
The other new piece of software from Adobe is the DNG profile tool, this can be downloaded from the same link as the Camera profiles plugin (here). Essentially the DNG profile tool allows the user to create custom profiles for converting RAW files into images. For a good overview of this new application, luminous landscapes have written a good article (click here to read it). For a detailed tutorial on how to use the application, adobe have put out a tutorial (click here to read it)
Hey thanks for the mention – it’s always a nice surprise to see someone is actually reading. On that note, I wanted to also say thanks again for your post earlier about putting the batteries from old UPS together for a portable power source with studio lights. Having recently acquired some older SV monolights, I am now tooled to give it a whirl! Will let you know how things turn out…