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Participant
July 3, 2020
Question

Adobe Camera Portrait or Adobe Colour?

  • July 3, 2020
  • 4 replies
  • 3164 views

I just noticed that when I click 'Reset' on a Raw image straight out of camera in Lightroom Classic that it changes the colour profile from Adobe Colour to Camera Portrait. This has a drastic affect on the colours, shadows and contrast. What should I be working with? The portrait mode looks much softer and true to real colours.

 

Thank you people 🙂

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4 replies

Conrad_C
Community Expert
Community Expert
July 3, 2020

Camera companies have known for decades that scientifically objective “accurate” color is not seen as “pleasing” by most people. We actually prefer colors that are tuned to emphasize what we like about an image. This was true going back to the old color film days, when some films were tuned for portrait colors (skin tones), and others were tuned for landscape colors (skies, foliage, earth).

 

Adobe Colour is designed to be a good general-purpose profile, which means it’s probably OK for most things but not the best for every image. In other words, the maximum compromise. If you liked Camera Portrait more, then that is a more appropriate profile for the specific image you were looking at, but might not be as good at bringing out the colors in a sunset or bird photo, for example.

 

A good strategy is to set your default to a profile you like on most of your images, but be prepared to try other profiles when you shoot other types of images. By the way, profiles starting with “Adobe” are what Adobe thinks are the best colors out of that camera, while the “Camera” profiles try to match the colors in the JPEG images rendered by that camera.

Sean McCormack
Community Expert
Community Expert
July 3, 2020

Lightroom now reads the profile you have set in camera and applies it. cmgap gives the depth on dealing with it, that way you can have what you prefer on Import, as Just Shoot Me suggests. You could potentially play around with the in camera style settings to get what you prefer in camera, and then Lightroom will pick this up automatically. 

Sean McCormack. Author of 'Essential Development 3'. Magazine Writer. Former Official Fuji X-Photographer.
cmgap
Community Expert
Community Expert
July 3, 2020

You can learn more about working with RAW image defaults here: https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/help/raw-defaults.html. The ability to set how  Lr handles the RAW profile for your images can be found in the Preferences>Preset tab.

 
 
 

 

Just Shoot Me
Legend
July 3, 2020

All of this is Subjective. You should be working with whichever you like best for that particular image.