P: Nikon Z6 RAW processing and Adobe WB

Victoria, to add to Steffen's comments, in my experience if you take the exact same file into Nikon's Capture NX software, it fully corrects the vignette. The vignette description in the file is just fine and Nikon did a good job measuring it, Adobe just undercorrects for it. I had a long discussion on the support forums where it became very clear that Adobe just doesn't use the vignette information the same way as Nikon does leading to uncorrected vignette in Lightroom/ACR. Also in Nikon's software, you can easily turn on and off the geometry and vignette corrections, or regulate the amount of correction applied. You can't do that in Lightroom. Also if you turn off the corrections in camera, Lightroom ignores this setting and still applies the corrections but capture NX doesn't. The built-in profiles should simply be treated in the same way as Adobe profiles. You should be able to turn them off and use the sliders to regulate how much correction is applied.

Victoria, and of course, you do have a point: if all images coming out of expensive cameras would be perfect - this would also be my ideal situation. In fact, it's not that i desire sitting down many hours to edit images. However: wouldn't that situation also render Lightroom (partially) irrelevant? 😉

Victoria, i do work professionally with microscopes including ones costing beyond 100,000 €. Please trust me when i report that things are not the way they should be. All of this was reported and files were shared with Rikk since early 2020. I hope you can agree that this is a long time (corresponding to those mentioned hundreds of additional hours needed to deal with those heavy vignetting). Of course, this is a classical first world problem but many of us are committed (professionally) to produce highest quality and useful/meaningful progress and it this commitment and engagement that keeps us going.

Just to clarify there is a contract between Adobe and me as customer, which stipulates that Adobe will keep its software up to date (meaning adapt to new cameras and lenses). This part of the contract has been broken (i have produced the proof and shared this with Rikk almost 2 years ago) and customers are being left in the dust (or required to invest hundreds of hours to repair images, which should be the job of Lightroom - well it used to be the job of Lightroom since version 1 when i joined this enterprise for all Nikon cameras and lenses). What is wrong with the z lenses that Adobe decided to (i) produce such an underwhelming implementation of what's essentially a perfect built-in profile and (ii) leave the paying customer with no option to apply other (including own) correction profiles... this is an totally unnecessary source of major frustrations.

Oh that's interesting to know it works as expected on the JPEGS. It initially sounded like the built-in profile was poor quality, but that makes it sound more like a bug in the way the profile is being read by Lightroom. 

Oops. Simply NO. The built-in profile from Nikon is PERFECT (both the JPEGs produced by Nikon as well as its own - but otherwise insufficient - RAW converter does not produce heavy vignetting).

Why should i be interested in Adobe's decision making process. I am paying cold cash and therefore, only my interest can ever count for me. Or do i get paid by Adobe?

@Steffen70 I'm not going to comment on the rights or wrongs of Adobe's prioritisation decisions, but I can't help but wonder why you're not mad at Nikon for producing such a poor built-in profile in the first place. You paid them a lot more money for the camera than you pay Adobe, and it seems like something they should be able to fix with a firmware update.

Dear Victoria, earlier today Rikk decided to kid me. TWO YEARS ago he had requested me to produce and share an example of the totally insufficient implementation of the Z lens correction profiles (HEAVY vignetting, which cannot be corrected manually nor by a self-produced lens correction profile - but anyway why should i when i'm paying Adobe € 300 to do this work? - because LR Classic would only allow corrections ON TOP of the optically jarring automatic correction). 8 MONTHS ago he had confirmed (in fact, several times since then!) that the team is working on it. And now he suggests that i should BEG Adobe again? What is going on - is everyone at Adobe on vacation (this is the impression from a customer perspective)?

Thanks Victoria. I know it runs only on old Macs (i kept one just in case) but the thing is that the current implementation in LR Classic would not allow anyone to load another profile. So quite a few users (thousands i would guess who by now own a Nikon Z camera) are stuck with the subpar implementation of the automatically applied lens corrections (contained in the Nikon NEF/RAW file). Any further corrections (available in the Manual Lens Correction panel) are applied ON TOP of the automatically implemented (but largely insufficient) corrections - which results in an optical mess....

You know there is a Lens Profile Creator tool so you could make your own lens profile instead of having to wait until it makes its way up Adobe's priority list?