I’m a recent convert from Apple Aperture 2.1 to Adobe Lightroom 2.x. Why? I discovered that Lightroom is currently more equipped to handle high volume workflow that Aperture. Global presets (presets for just about everything for that matter), better selective editing (more like Capture NX2), better interaction with Photoshop, the ability to use Photoshop droplets in presets, and most of all Adobe Camera Profiles.
However… I’ve discovered that the “Recovery” slider is the pits. It destroys the color in an image. Everything else works great. As Lightroom users know, the recovery slider is there to bring back blown out highlights if have happen to overexpose a portion of your image. It’s designed to just bring back the very top of the highlights, leaving the rest of your exposure alone. This is a FANTASTIC tool to have. Aperture has it and it works wonderfully. Unfortunately, in Lightroom, it’s a image destroyer!!!
I found this article by Chromasoft about Hue Twists in DNG Camera Profiles. It explains WHY the recovery slider is broken. I don’t pretend to understand it, but the writer explains it and I encourage you to go read it. The developer at Chromosoft wrote a program to fix this Hue Twisting problem that makes the recovery slider useless. It’s a UNIX command. I’m pretty much a UNIX geek. So, I used his tool to create untwisted camera profiles for my camera. Here’s some examples of the results:
This shot was with the default Adobe Camera profile using the “D3 Standard” Profile. This is to kind of baseline everything. No additional exposure adjustments were made.
In this second shot, We I used the default Adobe Camera profile for the “D3 Standard” Profile again. This time, I used the recovery slider at +11. You can see that a lot of the color in her face has gone away. It’s turned a little “ashy”. Many people live with this and just bump up the warmth with the whitebalance.
The other alternative that many use is to avoid the recovery slider all together. Instead, they just bump the overall exposure down and the recover with the “Fill Light” or brightness. So, here I’m still using the Adobe default “D3 Standard” profile. I’ve lowered the exposure by -.42 and bumped up the “Fill Light” by +18. This is better, but the color is still shifted.
Last… I’ve used the dcp tool to “untwist” the camera profile. I went back to using the recovery slider. So… the formula for this one is the “UnTwisted D3 Standard” profile, with -11 on the recover slider. AS you can see. There’s still nice color. The image didn’t turn ashy. I think this is very nice.
I posted this experiment on Flickr. I discovered that I wasn’t the only one with a hatred for the recovery slider in Lightroom. Wedding Photographer extraordinaire and all around good guy, Ryan Brenizer asked me to send him an untwisted profile to play with and he immediately loved it. Since this many who are not as “UNIX friendly” as I am have asked me for untwisted camera profiles for their cameras as well. So… tonight I wrote a script to convert ALL of the current Adobe Camera RAW profiles into untwisted profiles.
If you’d like to have the untwisted versions of these camera profiles, please:
Download here for MAC OSX
Download here for WINDOWS.
This will download a Mac OSX dmg file. Then do this:
- Open the dmg (or zip on windows)
- Find your camera (if it’s not there, then it doesn’t exist).
- Double click on your camera’s folder. Inside will be the untwisted camera profiles renamed appropriately.
- FOR MAC’s
- Open a second finder window and go to: Macintosh HD -> Library -> Application Support -> Adobe -> CameraRaw -> CameraProfiles -> Camera -> YOUR CAMERA
- FOR WINDOWS
- Open a second explorer window and put this path into the address box: “C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Adobe\CameraRaw\CameraProfiles\Camera”
- Drag the untwisted profiles for your camera into the appropriate folder above.
- Restart LR or Photoshop.
It won’t cause any damage. These files are in ADDITION to the existing profiles. All your existing profiles will still be available as they are named differently. However use these profiles at your own risk. I am NOT responsible for any thing screwing up.
If you like these… please share this blog entry. Feel free to repost, link to this blog, twitter, facebook, etc. I.e. show me some blog love if you like these profiles.
UPDATED to include Windows version.
UPDATED 11/24/09: I have created a set of “Invariate Adobe Camera Profiles“. Check out the post here.
by tlester
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