importance of Lightroom camera calibration settings with RAW (A7R2)

[Colin Surprenant]

Hi,

 

I am wondering if/how the Lightroom camera calibration setting is really important or has significative impact in the post workflow when working on RAWs. my specific body is a A7R2 but that's not really important here.

 

I have always been using the default "Adobe Standard" profile. All my pictures (keepers) are very much worked on in post. My workflow is to adjust all levels to satisfaction, but I have never been paying much attention to the camera calibration setting. 

 

Given my workflow, would using a set of "better" profiles, such as http://www.piraccini.net/2011/02/profili-colore-sony-a900-per-adobe-lr.html provide any advantage?  I have never expected to have a default JPEG-style rendering on my RAWs and actually assumed that starting from the "most neutral" settings would give me more options as I work on my images. I actually set my camera to Neutral and turned off any highlight/shadow recovery options and adjust levels myself in post.

 

I also absolutely do not care what the image actually look like in the viewfinder/screen, I only use it for focus and exposure - as long as these are good, I will handle the rest in post. 

 

Any opinions on this?

 

Thanks,

Colin

[Guest Jaf-Photo]

Adobe standard gives you images with some added contrast, warmth and saturation. Pleasing to the eye, sort of.

 

But as a starting point for manual adjustments, it's better to use Camera standard or neutral. You'll get better tones and more detail.

 

Best is however to get a colour checker with grey card. Then you can calibrate the colours in all lighting conditions. Very quickly you'll get a neutral and accurate staring point for further editing. It's not expensive or difficult, considering the huge benefits.

[Guest Peter Kelly]

Colour calibration is an interesting and complex subject about which I often have mixed feelings.

As perception can affect preferences, when it comes to the look, it can sometimes be difficult accepting the clinical results, but that is the only way to be sure of consistency.

 

That brings me to an addition related to the original question.

While calibrating the camera is vital, in many respects, so is calibrating the lenses. They can bring at least as much variation to the colour response as the sensor/firmware.

 

However, to go back to my original point, unless the viewer has a calibrated screen and perceives colour the same way your pictures won't look the same to them!

The only definitive time it is important is when you are getting prints. If you want to be confident that the print a third party produces for you will match your prints and your screen, then you have to calibrate every step.

[Guest all8]

I've just gotten my hands on an Xrite colormunki and passport.

 

With the colormunki I found my display had a slight blue tint, which I had not noticed (it was slight) however when corrected the improvement was worth while.

 

The passport is also really interesting, at least in neutral light (not sunset sunrise etc) its useful for getting white-balance spot on in PP, or taking a grey-card reading while out and about. Having all the colors documented in a test shot is also interesting. But the real reason I got that one was to try to build an adjustment to correct a blue cast which comes from using a strong ND filter (Lee big stopper) - still working on that.

 

So far, worth the effort, even for an amateur.

[bdp]

Hi Colin, 

 

I have found Maurizio's profiles to be extremely helpful in getting much more pleasing colour for the types of things I am shooting. Especially his neutral profile. I do also add about +10 to the shadow tint in the colour calibration tab by default. 

 

Ben

[Colin Surprenant]

Thanks for all the responses, this is very informative. This urged me in doing more research into color calibration and as Peter said, it is indeed an interesting and complex subject. I realize I have been pretty much been flying blind and relying only on my own perceptions and feelings to work on my pictures and in the end only relying on my uncalibrated monitor to guide me. 

 

So, I decided to order the X-Rite i1Display Pro and ColorChecker Passport Bundle. This will help me get a much better starting point.  I plan to use the ColorChecker with shots where I can or when it's practically possible to use. I will also try to build a few profiles with different typical lightning situations and a few of my most used lenses. I use almost exclusively vintage manual lenses and I expect this will be a very interesting process and help me better understand and quantify the actual differences in color response with my lenses. 

 

Also, I decided to purchase a new "real" printer (Epson P800) and all of this calibration madness makes even more sense in the context of reproducing my pictures in print. 

 

To be continued ...

[Colin Surprenant]

Received my i1Display Pro and ColorChecker Passport today. Mind blown. 

 

- My Thunderbolt monitor had only a slight shift but my laptop monitor had a bigger shift. 

 

- I created a profile with the ColorChecker and the result is pretty stunning. Now I can see that the Adobe Standard and the Camera xxx default profiles offer a pretty bad starting point compared to using the profile generated using the ColorChecker. I also compared with Maurizio's profiles, while definitely better than the others, still off per my generated calibration. This is certainly to be expected since my calibration was done with the same lightning and lens as shots, can't beat that...

 

This is really well worth the investment! 

 

Colin

[Guest Jaf-Photo]

Cool. Calibration is not only visually pleasing, it's a huge time saver.

 

You mentioned printing and that's probably where you save the most time. Once you turn off auto colour management, your prints should look exactly like the screen image, viewed in neutral lighting.

[Colin Surprenant]

@Jaf-Photo yup, it does! that's the second thing I tried: I printed that test shot I took using my generated calibration, with the proper paper profile in LR print color management and the result matches almost exactly what I see on screen. Amaze