Color Profiles // Adobe or Camera Settings?

[5omeone]

Dear LR community,

I've been using LR for years and only recently discovered that I can access the camera's color profiles via the development settings. I only came across this because I wanted to know if I could apply the Fuji film-simulations to RAW files in LR.

I found that there is a significant difference between the standard “Adobe Color” profile and the respective standard camera settings (regardless of the Fuji film-simulations).

The question for me now is, of course, whether I will only use the camera profiles in future. I suspect that these settings correspond to the color profiles designed by Canon, Fujifilm, Nikon etc. for the respective sensor. Using the Adobe color profile as the default seems to standardize this across multiple cameras.

What would you recommend? Does it make sense to switch to the camera settings by default or should you stick with the “Adobe Color” profile if you only use LR?

And I would also like to know whether the color profiles that can be selected via LR for the respective camera are actually Canon's own color profiles, for example, or whether they are just profiles created by Adobe and intended as an approximation.

Many thanks and best regards!

[Per Berntsen]

The camera matching profiles are made by Adobe, and are approximations.

I never use them, but apparently some of them are quite good, and some not so good.

You'll just have to try them and see if they fit your needs.

I use Adobe Standard for all my work, which provides me with a good starting point for any camera I might use.

I prefer to start out with a neutral rendering, and then edit the image to my liking.

So I don't mind if the colors look a bit off on the camera monitor (this is a jpg anyway), but I do check exposure and sharpness.

[Jao vdL]

It completely depends on your style and what you like. I often recommend people to use camera settings as raw default if they are bothered with the big shift from the initial preview to develop but there simply is no right answer. The point of raw is that it is completely up to you how to interpret it. The profiles are a part of it. If your style and preference aligns with the rendering if the camera profiles that's your answer.

an experiment to do is to start with an image at Adobe defaults and take that same image and start with camera settings (use the built in presets). Fully edit in both cases and compare the results. You'll likely end up very close.