How to turn off Color Profile?

[Marcie5F8E]

I used Dragonframe (stop motion software) to process images, so I have a JPG and RAW export for the same images. The JPG export is neutral and clearly doesn't have a LUT applied to it, but in Camera Raw I can't turn off the color profile LUT. How do I turn off the LUT?

[TheDigitalDog]

You cannot not have some profile defined. 

You can make your own which may be the route to take next.

[Marcie5F8E]

But in Bridge, I can see the LUT being applied in real-time as the images load. Why does the RAW image have a LUT applied but the JPG doesn't?

[Conrad_C]

You’re assuming a LUT is being applied, but that’s not what’s happening. What you see in Bridge is the same thing you see in Camera Raw: Adobe Camera Raw is applying its default raw-to-RGB conversion settings to generate a preview, and its defaults are different than the in-camera settings that generated the camera JPEGs.*

If you do not like the default Camera Raw conversion, the answer is not to “stop the LUT,” since that isn’t what is happening. The Adobe conversion may not involve a LUT at all (it can, but often doesn’t), because the fundamental step of a raw-to-RGB conversion is any application is demosaicing, not LUT remapping. I haven’t used Dragonframe, but from their website it looks like it simply controls a standard camera. So…

Which camera did you use? What you want to do in Camera Raw is find the Camera Matching profiles for the camera you used Dragonframe to control. Then apply the Camera Matching profile that matches the JPEGs most closely, or the one you like the most. You might find that Neutral or Standard matches JPEGs better than the other profiles, but what you really want to look for is a Camera Matching profile named like the settings (typically the Picture Style) you selected on the camera at the time of the shoot. The example below shows the Camera Matching profile provided for my old Canon 7D; the names of the Camera Matching profiles may be different for various cameras. 

If you still don’t think it’s a close enough match (and if you changed certain in-camera settings, it might not be), you can try to change Camera Raw adjustments to make the raw files look like a JPEG from that camera, then you can save that as the default conversion for your camera so it will just convert them all that way in the future.

When viewing the raw images in Bridge for the first time, you might see an initial image that changes to a different version. That is not a LUT being applied. What really happens is:

1. Bridge may first display the JPEG preview embedded into the raw file by the camera.
2. As soon as possible, Bridge replaces it with the default Adobe Camera Raw conversion. Why? Because the raw conversion engines used by the camera and Camera Raw are different, so Adobe may not match the camera look exactly.

If you want Bridge to display the JPEG previews that the camera embedded for its raw files, you can set the Bridge previews to Embedded. But camera-embedded previews cannot be preserved as soon as you open any of those raw files in Camera Raw, because then the Camera Raw engine's own raw conversion and settings must take over.

If you love the exact look of the camera JPEGs and really don’t need to adjust them very much, maybe it’s better to stick with the camera JPEGs and edit from those…because the entire point of raw is to be able to edit them differently than the default camera conversion.

*In case this needs to be made clear, the raw file data from any camera cannot be visible as a photo on its own. A raw file is a single channel of sensor data, so for any application to make a visible picture out of that, it has to be interpreted/converted into three RGB channels. There is no “right” conversion; the engineering team behind every camera and raw processor decides on what their default “look” for raw files is going to be, and they all decide differently. Kind of the way various films look different by design.

[Marcie5F8E]

Thank you for the great and thorough response--I see now that there isn't a LUT being applied but rather that this is a RAW to image conversion issue. 

I'm still struggling with getting the RAW image to look like the JPG, even by changing the camera profile to neutral. Here are some screenshots which might help: 

The darker image is the RAW with a neutral color profile applied, and the lighter image is the unedited JPG. It seems like the exposure itself is completely different. Why exactly does that change, and (apart from manually editing) is there any way to get the RAW image to look more like the brighter, lower contrast JPG?

[D Fosse]

It looks like you have the camera set to a function that automatically increases brightness and lifts the shadows. This function goes by different names in different camera makes, I can't remember them all.

The point is that this is post-processing in camera that only affects the jpegs and LCD preview, not the raw sensor data.

You need to turn this function off.

[TheDigitalDog]

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@Marcie5F8E wrote:

Thank you for the great and thorough response--I see now that there isn't a LUT being applied but rather that this is a RAW to image conversion issue. 

I'm still struggling with getting the RAW image to look like the JPG, even by changing the camera profile to neutral. Here are some screenshots which might help: 

The darker image is the RAW with a neutral color profile applied, and the lighter image is the unedited JPG. It seems like the exposure itself is completely different.

 Exposure only takes place at catpure, it is the combo of aperture and shutter to affect the amount of light striking the sensor. One image above is darker, the other brigther due to rendering of the same data and exposure. Make an adjustment in Lightroom Classic to affect the brightness as desired, apply it as a preset etc. 

See:

http://www.lumita.com/site_media/work/whitepapers/files/pscs3_rendering_image.pdf