Thursday, April 28, 2011

Lightroom 3.4 & ACR 6.4 Untwisted & Invariant Camera Profiles

These profiles are now available from the Download page under the Menu on the right.

9 comments:

  1. I'm a little confused by the various downloads available. I am using Lightroom 3.4.1 and have a D300.

    What is the difference between the final LR 3.4 & ACR 6.4 profiles on your download page and the Nikon D3 D700 D300 Beta v3 profiles?

    Is there any reason to use older versions of your profiles (like v2 instead of v3 or the release candidate profiles instead of the final 3.4 profiles)?

    Do the profiles that don't have a readme.txt also need the exposure reduced by .5?

    Are the Adobe Standard NP profiles invariant profiles as well?

    Thanks and sorry for the myriad questions.

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  2. You just need the latest 3.4/6.4 profiles. The older versions are generally the same but don't contain the latest cameras.

    The beta profiles were released by Adobe and are still in beta testing. Only the v3 beta profiles need the exp adjustment. (If your not beta testing then I wouldn't bother with them).

    The NP profiles are not invariant or untwisted they are just the Adobe Standard profiles with my personal adjustments. I use these for my D300/700 as my defaults as they work best under many different conditions.

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  3. So:

    The LR 3.4 & ACR 6.4 are the newest based on the official profiles.

    The Beta v3 are newer than the LR 3.4 & ACR 6.4 and based on Beta profiles Adobe has created to fix certain issues with certain Nikons (including mine). Is there a reason I should avoid using these (I keep reading a lot of positive comments about these on various forums) instead of the official profiles?

    BTW. I really like the Standard NP profile.

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  4. You can certainly use them if you like the results. The v3 requires a .5 stop in exposure. When they release the new profiles that won't be the case, how will you update the exposure on all the photos using the v3 beta profile by .5 stop ? LR & ACR use 1/3 stops in the quick develop panel which is the only way to do delta changes to multiple photos. The v2 profiles don't have this issue and that would be my choice if I wanted the Nikon look as ther are certainly an improvement over the current Camera Standard / Portrait / Vivid etc...

    These profiles try to mimic the Nikon jpeg which many people seem to want. Personally I think the colours in the Nikon jpegs are pretty inaccurate and thats why after a two years of fiddling I have returned to the Adobe Profile but with my tweaks, Hope this helps ;-)

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  5. Thanks for the quick reply.

    I only see v2 profiles for the D3 and D700 so I guess I am out of luck with my D300 (and some older D40 pics).

    Are the LR 3.4 & ACR 6.4 invariants still a better choice than the official LR 3.4 & ACR 6.4?

    Could you not have made your NP profile invariant? Why didn't you?

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  6. Invariants seemed better to me, they didn't change colours when I used the exposure and recovery tools so I used them quite a bit. I never really thought to make invariants of the NP profiles... I should give it a go and see how they work :-)

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  7. I have added invariant versions of the NP profiles to the download page but I haven't tested them.

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  8. Thanks Nik,

    I tried the NP invariant but don't see much if any difference over the regular NP profile.

    I see very slight changes in "some" histograms but....

    Maybe I need to find a really difficult raw file that needs a significant amount of highlight protection.

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  9. I should have said "highlight recovery" in my last post.

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