Although I use Adobe Lightroom for all my pictures and have on several occasions recommended it as doing 99% of what photographers need, there are some aspects of it I’ve not found useful as well as pretty essential features I think are missing.
So I was very interested to read a blog post by Thomas Foster, Untwisted Adobe Camera Profiles. Foster is a recent convert to Lightroom from Aperture making the change for its better workflow with “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, like me, he finds the results of the ‘Recovery’ slider disappointing. I’ve learnt to keep or return it to zero as a first stage in my development of any imag, as it has a flattening effect on the image highlights I find disappointing. Following that I use the selective editing tool to tone down just the out of range highlight areas, either by a simple ‘exposure’ painting – using a value of perhaps -20 and sometimes painting several times, or by using my special “highlight removal” preset (Exposure -40, Brightness +20 or similar.)
Foster read an article by Chromasoft, Hue Twists in DNG Camera Profiles, which looks at the deliberate “twisting” in Adobe profiles that gives a slight shift in tint with different intensities. The result of this is normally a more natural look, but it is one of the effects which can make the ‘Recovery’ tool give odd results.
Foster provides a link to a file containing “untwisted” profiles which will avoid this and gives instructions for installing these for the cameras that you use so they will be avaiilable in both Photshop and Lightroom. It’s simple, takes only a few minutes, and leaves the standard Adobe profiles intact. Once you have the untwisted profiles in place and have restarted Lightroom, you can then select the untwisted profiles when working with images by going to ‘Camera Calibration’ in the Develop module and selecting one of the “untwisted’ profiles.
I tired this out with the beta version of Lightroom 3, using some files with fairly challenging highlights, and it did make it much easier to deal with them, and I couldn’t see any problems caused either by the new profiles, though they do have a slightly unwelcome flattening on the lighter tones so it’s still better where possible to use the standard profiles. These are however a very useful method when you need them.
