P: Disable built-in lens profile

[Tokumeino]

I own Micro43 and compact cameras, where lens profiles are integrated in RAW files. With software like Capture One Pro, I can easily enable or disable theses built-in profiles. Actually, there is even a slider allowing to enable 0% or 100% of the built-in profile, and whatever percentage in between.

In LR (CC, Classic or LR6), the checkox for enabling or disabling profiles does not work with built-in profiles, which always stay enabled. This seriously limits the possibilities of several cameras which possibilities get unleashed by actual RAW developpers like Capture One Pro.

I'm actually a COP user (after switching from LR) but DAM sucks with COP and this built-in lens profile thing is the only deal breaker for me to come back. So please let users disable built-in lens profiles, or at least offer workarounds.

As a workaround, a dumb "zero" profile that would replace the built-in one (not coming on top of it) could do the job.

[Todd Shaner]

The difference between the -1 and -3 image files with no distortion correction applied is very small and only visible as I outlined in my last reply. That is why there is no issue aligning them, but it is indicative that the lens zoom focal length setting was physically changed. This is also verified in the RAF file's distortion correction metadata that is different for the -3 RAF file. LR simply "reads" this metadata written to the file by the camera.

Concerning C1 showing Distortion set to 100 for some files and 0 for others is something you'll need to discuss with C1 Tech Support or in their forum. I see no settings in the file metadata that should cause that to happen.

[hunterr89148280]

Thanks Todd. The point here on those two images is that being able to turn off the automatic lens corrections would solve my problem. As all I really want to do is blend them. Which I can do with the files as exported by C1.
However, physically changing the zoom focal length doesn't explain the same problem in the auto bracketed set where the camera wasn't touched. So I assume the problem is actually elsewhere.
From that I also assume that what's causing C1 to apply Distortion correction to one image and not the other is the same as what's causing the difference between image 2 (distorted) and the other four in the auto bracketed images, also visible in Lightroom. And also that it's that unknown that's causing image 2 of the bracketed set to read as 11.5mm and the other four as 12mm.

[Todd Shaner]

It could be due to a defect with the lens, but I don't see any differences in the -3 file metadata other than the 11.5mm vs 12.0mm correction data. Do you see the same issue when using a different lens?

[hunterr89148280]

No, but I don't do any bracketing with other lenses.Looking through my Lightroom catalog, the similarity I do find in files from other lenses is that sometimes I get one which doesn't say anything about 'Built-In' Lens Profile Applied.' in Lens Corrections, and when I turn on Enable Profile Corrections, it says "Unable to locate a matching profile automatically" and "None" in the drop down menu.
Looking further I find many like that from the 56mm, 35mm and 23mm. Sometimes they seem to be the first one or two images from a shoot, but in other folders it goes on throughout the shoot. Lightroom identifies the lenses correctly in the upper righthand panel but can't find a profile for them. But then other times it does find the right profile. Very strange! Thanks for prodding me to look further. So it seems more a camera issue than software or lens.

[Todd Shaner]

So it seems more a camera issue than software or lens.

Try searching the Fuji XT forum for this issue:

https://www.fujix-forum.com/forums/
If you don't find anything add a new post there and please post back here if you find an answer. Thanks!

[hunterr89148280]

Thanks for your help Todd.

[TheGreekGeek]

This may be a dumb question (I don't believe in such a thing) but what if I DON'T want to apply the automatic corrections.  That is, what if I want to retain a little bit of distortion to avoid too much cropping or because I like the look, what if I want to retain some vignetting because I like the look... 

Point being, by default "Enable Profile corrections" is disabled and I can't adjust distortion and vignetting in any way.  To do so requires that I enable that option which auto-selects some random Nikon Lens with it's own profile that distorts the image based on said profile. 

I've used LR for nearly a decade shooting Canon and Nikon.  I love my Z6 but I'd like a bit more control over lens profiles and the current UX doesn't give that.

I recently (last year) tried out a few other editors because of this issue.  I was hoping the 9.2 update addressing RAW presets/defaults would address it but I wasn't to a point I could easily update my catalogs. 

That changed today....

I've yet to fully try out the RAW defaults feature.  At a minimum I'm hoping that (if at first glance I've properly understood the feature) I will avoid having to do what I've been doing since last March - applying a preset which zero's out values to avoid the garish contrast (et al) adjustments Nikon was applying in camera. 

That said, when I go to "Lens Corrections" in the Develop module the UI doesn't expose the capability to adjust the vignetting/distortion without disabling the setting as per above so I feel certain it won't be addressed by these RAW defaults. 

If CaptureOne (and I think ON1) allow me to adjust these settings without automatically applying them then why not LR?  Just give us the freedom to do so.  I know from importing some wide-angle shots into Capture One LR is definitely cropping these.

At the end of the day I can just enable manual correction, but again if I'm trying to retain a bit of distortion and say move the slider to 25% the lens selected (for example 105mm when lens used was 24-70 f/4 z) will retain distortion to that level based on the 105's profile.  I know this b/c I can switch to any other lens (say a fish-eye) on the same image and get drastically different results.  While moving the slider to 0 is effectively saying perform 0 corrections and allows me to retain all distortion this issue is keeping me from adjusting part of the way.

If I'm doing this wrong or misunderstanding what's happening let me know, but I gather from the results I've seen with my own eyes in CaptureOne that LR is restricting me with the Z lenses.

ASIDE QUESTION RE LENS PROFILES:

I recently picked up a 50 1.2 AIS.  Is there any way to quickly apply that profile to all lenses that lack one (I also have a pre-AI but AI converted 135 2.8 so I don't want to blanket apply on all images).  The current UI keeps defaulting to Nikon Cool PIX...

[John R Ellis]

See this post for how to stop LR from automatically applying the built-in lens profile: 
https://community.adobe.com/t5/camera-raw/deactivate-integrated-lens-profiles/td-p/9572619?page=1

[Jao vdL]

Except for hacking the raw files indeed.

[TarekAlShawwa]

Yes please, I fully support this idea, I recently became a capture one customer because of this and purchased a copy of rawdigger to look into things a bit deeper and as someone who shoots on multiple camera systems, these forced built in profile corrections drive me insane, let us use the full sensor information that our cameras can capture Adobe, please and thank you.

if i wanted my photos to be altered in anyway rather than having the RAW data for processing, i would just shoot jpegs with picture profiles and use the straight out of camera images, removing the need for your software.

please let us turn these corrections off, otherwise you're just giving your competition a unique selling proposition, they literally have a feature that gives people more control and Adobe are driving their own customers to capture one

[Todd Shaner]

Just updated to LR Classic 9.2.1 and can confirm Adobe has disabled the built-in lens profile for the Nikon D780 camera. The Nikon Z Series cameras and lenses still require the built-in lens profile because Adobe has not created matching lens profiles for the Z lenses. It's still beneficial to offer the option to disable it or ability to adjust the distortion and vignetting 'Amount' (0-100) for these lenses.

The D780 NEFs I've checked so far all look much better with the Adobe lens profile applied and you can "dial-back" the Distortion and Vignetting Amount to suite your preference. More at this post:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic/lens-correction-with-integrated-lens-profile-from-r...

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

This has been implemented for select camera models going forward from the August release (Camera Raw 12.4, Lightroom Classic 9.4 and LIghtroom Desktop 3.4).  There are no plans to make this retroactive to previously released camera models. 

[PKers]

I tried it on the Z7 and found out that it is not working:
it was the f2.8 24-70mm nikkor S lens that remained auto corrected in LR9.4
Does it mean Adobe has to make lensprofiles for many lenses anew and before that the auto correction stays on?

Or is it camera related? What is the problem exactly? Why did it take so long to implement it?

[Jao vdL]

Rikk, I would very strongly suggest this gets implemented for the recent mirrorless cameras that are really DSLRs from Nikon and Canon - i.e. the Z series and the R series. These are used by many pros and we need the control. A simple button to turn the built-in correction on and off. I am of the opinion that on those cameras the built-in correction should be turned off by default or if you select camera settings as the default for the develop, it should react to the camera settings. Right now if you have the lens correction and vignette control turned off in camera for example, Lightroom still applies lens corrections!

[John R Ellis]

Perhaps this is a contractual issue. In the past, there were hints from Adobe employees on this forum that, as part of the legal agreements giving Adobe permission access to the proprietary information inside raw files, Adobe agreed to always enable the lens profile (can't find those posts now). So perhaps perhaps the parties have revised the contracts for new cameras but don't want to revise the existing contracts for some reason.  Just a guess.

[Jao vdL]

I remember that too being the case for a few select mirrorless cameras that had extreme lens distortion. There was some talk about Adobe being forced to apply correction in those cases. However, I highly doubt that this is true for the recent interchangeable lens mirrorless cameras from Nikon and Canon seeing how you can turn the lens correction off in camera - making the jpeg and the raw when rendered in Nikon Capture NX-D (for the Nikon Z cameras) render without lens correction. Adobe ignores these settings and still applies the built-in profile even if they are turned off in camera! The only thing you can do about this is to hack the raw file and delete the profile from it or render it in other software.

[Todd Shaner]

So perhaps perhaps the parties have revised the contracts for new cameras but don't want to revise the existing contracts for some reason.  Just a guess.

It's usually "new technology" that companies want to protect. Excluding the older models in a contract makes no sense. It's more likely an Adobe internal decision due to the cost of "updating" all those older camera model lenses. So do it as a longer term "background activity." It should be relatively simple and something a "technician" level employee could perform. I speak from 45 years in the computing technology industry as a system design engineer.

I've stated this in the Adobe forums numerous times, but it bears repeating.
Vignetting and rectilinear distortion correction to make your digital camera images "100% perfect" is generally unnecessary and can even degrade the image quality. Distortion Correction Cons

1)It crops the image to maintain straight image borders–You lose image peripheral area that is corrected. Wide and ultra-wide zoom lenses generally have significant barrel distortion. Applying 100% correction "effectively"increase the focal length, which means that expensive 12-24mm zoom lens may provide something closer to a 14-26mm lens. It also reduces the image resolution in those “stretched” areas due to upscaling interpolation of the image data.

2) Wide angle lenses generally exhibit barrel type distortion, which actually helps to reduce corner and edge"stretching" of the image. By correcting this distortion to make it 100% "geometrically correct" the elongation will become more noticeable. In fact there is software available that can apply"non-rectilinear correction" (volume anamorphosis) to wide angle images to remove some of the elongation. This "added distortion"can actually improve certain images (i.e. people pictures).

As Adobe Engineer Eric Chan outlined at the below post you can simply use the 'Manual' Lens Corrections Distortion slider to add barrel distortion, but then you’ll be cropping the image in addition to the lens profile distortion correction cropping. Allowing manual adjustment of the lens profile provides a more direct and comprehensive solution.


http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/correct_stretching_effect_from_an_ultra_wide_a...

Vignetting Correction Cons

1) Most people are accustomed to seeing some vignetting in photographs and in fact vignetting is sometimes "added"to images to focus attention on the central subject.

2) Wide and ultra-wide angle lenses usually exhibit significant vignetting especially at wide apertures, which can be as much as -3EV. You will need to apply +3EV of exposure compensation in the extreme corners to achieve 100% vignetting correction. This will significantly raise shadow noise and can also reduce image quality due to increased visibility of lens defects such as astigmatism, and coma.

[Jao vdL]

I don't think there is significant cost involved apart from a bit of programmer time. All they need to do is allow us to turn off and on the correction using the raw built-in profile. It is a simple switch. They don't need to profile any lenses. Just turn that part of the code path off and on.

[Todd Shaner]

I just tested Panasonic DC-G100 and Canon EOS R6 raw files to get an idea of how this works. Interestingly the lens profile can be turned off (Enable Profile Corrections unchecked) for both camera raw files, but the Panasonic DC-G100 raw files only allow adjusting Distortion Amount with Vignetting grayed out. So it appears there's more to it as far as being able to adjust the amount of correction applied. For me that's really of more value than being able to simply turn off lens corrections. I have all of my lenses set to varying amounts of Distortion and Vignetting correction except for a 50mm macro lens, which is near perfect. Some lenses that use built-in lens correction have fisheye type distortion that is very visible without some correction applied. Here's an example in my reply in this post three years ago.

https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/disable-built-in-lens-profile?topic-reply-lis...

[John R Ellis]

"Excluding the older models in a contract makes no sense."
"I don't think there is significant cost involved apart from a bit of programmer time."

There may well be separate form contracts covering each camera model that are signed when the camera is released.  If that's true, allowing the application of the lens profile to be disabled for older cameras would require revising those existing contracts. That would involve the legal departments of Adobe and each camera manufacturer, and some junior lawyer would be assigned the task of examining each contract in turn to make sure there's no legal gotchas.  

While that may seem trivial, legal departments in large corporations can be extremely slow, difficult to work with, and excessively focused on their own department's costs rather than the overall good of the business. Since the legal department reports to corporate counsel who reports directly to the CEO, any disagreements between legal and product must ultimately be resolved by the CEO. Do you think the Adobe CEO is going to spend any time thinking about this tiny issue?  Do you think the legal departments at Canon, Nikon, and the other manufacturers care about this?  They often still act as if supporting Lightroom is an annoyance, of little value to most of their customers.

[TarekAlShawwa]

I fully agree, there needs to be a way to turn off forced lens corrections, it degrade image quality, when correcting for distortion pixels get stretched and when correcting for vignetting it make noise more visible in the corners, and some people like ADDING vignettes in their images, it make no sense to have the software remove the real natural vignette and then add a fake vignette in the corners which always looks substantially worse, all adobe to do is let us uncheck a box, this isn't even a feature request, it's a request for the ability to turn OFF a "feature" that degrades image quality.

[TheGreekGeek]

@Rikk I hate to come off confrontational, but there have been 8 replies to your comment and more than 3 months has gone by. You've provided no additional feedback regarding your comment but were asked straight out of the gate to provide more.

There are literally hundreds of posts about this specific issue littered across the internet going back to the release of the first generation of Nikon/Canon mirror-less barely just over 2 years ago so clearly there is a need for "Customer Advocacy" on this.

I didn't buy a 14mm lens to have it cropped down to 18mm equivalent because Adobe/Nikon feel lines should always be perfectly straight and fall-off is bad. It's art, not perfection! If I want to correct one image but not another for artistic reasons I should have that freedom. What is even the point of allowing "Custom" on those cameras if you can't even select the relevant lens profile in the drop down and are instead force to choose a "similar" lens and deal with far worse distortions?

This complaint has raged since those cameras were released and for those cameras to be ignored by this is unbelievable. The fact that such a recent crop of cameras is being thrown into this lot of "legacy" cameras is also confounding.

More to the point, this is not an issue with other mainstream RAW editors; editors that have become even more mainstream since the cloud model was adopted. As someone who shoots a large amount of wide angle photography, it is the very reason I began to look at ON1, C1, and Luminar that do not force this crop on _all_ our images; they give their users a choice.

The fact that I can download a Z6ii RAW from DPReview and disable this is infuriating and if my only option to have full control of my images in terms of forced crop on wide angle photos is to switch it's certainly cheaper than upgrading my camera. 

That said, I'd rather not switch as I truly enjoy working in LR (used it since 4.0); however, I much prefer to have the freedom to express my artistic license on such a heavy-handed feature than I care about sticking with LR. No one likes change, but once such a hurdle is passed it's not easily crossed again. Considering the other offerings add far more editing tools such as layering is compelling. The hassle of migration has been the main impediment to integrating such tightly integrated editing features into my workflow but if I have additional reasons to make the switch...

I will note that knowing that Adobe is willing to write-off a 2 year old crop of cameras as legacy and not worthy of "customer advocacy" is of concern long term if other similar issues arise. Given we pay month-to-month being "mostly ignored" on this is demoralizing considering the previous model netted me 18+ months for an $80 upgrade when the same now costs me over double that. I say mostly ignored because his isn't the only post on this topic where the response is "works as is" and requests for additional feedback are ignored.

At a bare minimum confirm the suspicion made above that it is contractual so those of us who've been hoping it would be resolved can move on, whatever that may entail.

[TheGreekGeek]

I'll add that if you look at my profile all my recent posts relate to this topic. I don't post often, but I'm using LR/PS/Camera Raw all the time.

[ashraf_khunduqji]

@chris_castleberry 

we pay for you when we use lightroom or adobe products, not sony not nikon not any other company!

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

@Ashraf Khunduqji the ability to disable the built in lens profiles was implemented ages ago, however the change only affects cameras added from that point on.