Sunday, July 18, 2010

Invariant Camera Profiles Save The Day !

A long standing issue I have had with Adobe Lightroom (ACR) camera profiles is the "hue twisting" that happens when you apply the recovery slider in the basic panel. It would just suck the colour from the images. I usually have to avoid the recovery slider and reduce exposure instead and then use the fill light slider to try and compensate. The tone curve tool is also a reasonable substitute, but highlight recovery would be much more useful in many situations especially if you like to use the Auto Tone function to get your base exposure set.

I once tried using untwisted profiles but the results were not good. The colours would be way over-saturated and the hues twisted before any adjustments were made. Recently I discovered that dcpTool can now create "Invariant" profiles. What is an Invariant version? its a version thats somewhere between the standard twisted version and the untwisted version. It applies the default twist that Adobe applies to make sure the colours are accurate to start with, but then it doesn't do any extra twisting when you apply adjustments.

The examples below are shown with 50% Recovery applied.

Nikon D700 Camera Standard v2
Nikon D700 Camera Standard v2 Invariant


No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.