Colour profiles…again

Originally published 20/1/22 – Since the blog post “Colour Profiles” back in Sept ’21, Adobe Lightroom has included Camera Matching profiles for my camera – this now means what I see in the viewfinder or on the camera screen should now match what I see in Adobe Lightroom. Indeed, the colours are now closer to what I expected – much better than Adobe’s defaults. At the end of the last blog post on Colour Profiles, I speculated on whether we ever actually get to see a raw file. I have tried using Adobe Camera raw – which uses the same auto presets as Lightroom – so no view of raw files, I have also tried Canon DPP software – I expected this to use the camera preset – but it does not seem to (no hard evidence though). The camera seems to be applying some noise reduction and sharpening in camera – which can be turned off in DPP software – it is possible that DPP software is showing the raw image. For Mac users – the photo preview app DOES show raw files (as far as I can tell). Having compared the same image in three ways (unedited in Lightroom, Canon DPP & MacOS Preview) – the difference across the three is less than 1% – if anything the MacOS preview has slightly deeper colours – but it’s a very faint difference. All viewed on the same calibrated monitor. The point of shooting raw is, of course, to preserve as much data as is possible – making the choice that you, the user, will choose what calculations to apply and what data to discard rather than the camera or software. I find in interesting to note that we rarely get to see the raw files.