QPCard dcp profiles not showing up in LR/ACR? Try this...

As a bit of background - To make custom dcp camera profiles for ACR/LR, I use both a GMB ColorChecker 24 card with Adobe DNG Profile Editor and a QP202 card with QP's QPCalibration software. I will include links to both of these applications at the end of this post.

As you may or may not know, LR/ACR camera profiles are camera-specific; that is, if you use more than one camera to convert raw files in ACR/LR, the software will recognize the camera model and make available to you in the "Calibration" tab only the profiles for that particular camera.

So, when you want to make custom camera profiles, you shoot a well exposed image of a target, like the GMB CC24, the QP202 or the newer XRite Color Checker Passport, etc. You feed this to the calibration software and it spits out a "dcp" profile that it saves to the correct folder where LR/ACR will be able to access it and make that new profile available when converting raws from that camera model.

If you try to look inside one of these dcp profiles, you get garbled nonsense. However, there is a tool that you can use to decompile a dcp profile into easily readable XML. Here you can inspect and edit the profile and then recompile it into a dcp profile. This tool is called "dcptool" and is available here:

http://dcptool.sourcef​orge.net/Introduction.​html

So - on to the problem that started this thread. I took some shots of the QP202 card with my new Fujifilm FinePix X100 the other day to make a custom camera profile, as LR/ACR has only one profile available for this camera - Adobe Standard. Everything went fine with the QP Calibration software and it reported success - however, the profile did not appear in ACR/LR. Hmmmm.

I suspected that the way QPCalibration labeled the profile may be different than the tag that Adobe uses to label and recognize X100 dcp profiles. So, dcptool to the rescue. I shot a GMB CC 24 card with the X100 as well and used DNG Profile Editor to make a custom profile and it showed up no problem in ACR/LR. I used dcptool to decompile both the QP and Adobe profiles and, sure enough, at the very end of the profile XML, you get a discrepancy between the Adobe X100 tag and the QP X100 tag. Here is what I sent to QP to let them know of the problem - it details the findings:

I am using the QP202 on Mac OS X 10.7.4 with QPCalibration 1.15 and a Fujifilm FinePix X100.

I am making .dcp profiles for the Fujifilm Finepix X100 - the calibration process works fine, but the profile is not made available in ACR/LR. I suspected it was the camera specific tag. I used dcptool to convert the profile to xml - I did this for a QPCard dcp and a Adobe DNG Profile Editor dcp.


Here is the tag from a dcp profile made with AdobeDNG Profile Editor:

<ProfileCalibrationSign​ature>com.adobe</ProfileCalibrationSig​nature>
<UniqueCameraModelRestr​iction>Fujifilm FinePix X100</UniqueCameraModelRest​riction>

And here is what QPCalibration produces in its dcp:

<ProfileCalibrationSign​ature>QPC202</ProfileCalibrationSig​nature>
<UniqueCameraModelRestr​iction>FUJIFILM X100</UniqueCameraModelRest​riction>

Apparently the discrepancy between the "Fujifilm FinePix X100" adobe tag and the "FUJIFILM X100" QP tag causes the QP profile to not be available in ACR and LR. Once I cut and paste the Adobe tag into the QP profile and recompile it into a dcp profile, it appears in LR/ACR and works as intended.

So, it appears that the QPCalibration application needs to write "Fujifilm FinePix X100" as its UniqueCameraModelRestr​iction tag to get the QP profiles to be available in LR/ACR.

Hope this helps!

here is a link to dcptool, the command line tool i used to decompile and recompile the dcp profiles:

http://dcptool.sourcef​orge.net/Introduction.​html

Best,

kirk

So, bottom line - if you are making dcp profiles that are saved in the correct location but not showing up in ACR/LR, consider that the software you are using is mislabeling the UniqueCameraModelRestr​iction tag in the profile, confusing LR/ACR into not making the otherwise legit profile available.

Maybe this might help someone out there!

Kirk

QP Card: http://www.qpcard.com
Adobe DNG Profile Editor: http://labs.adobe.com/​wiki/index.php/DNG_Pro​files

As a P.S. I will add that I use QPcard 203 and have made several profiles for different light conditions with my 5D2 and all of them have duly appeared in LR's profile menu.

Kirk - I freely admit that I chose the QP system because it cost half as much and I'm a cheap "bastid". Do you see any significant difference between QP and X-Rite?

Hi Elie,

I only have a CC24, not a Passport, so take that for what it is worth, as the CC Passport is supposed to be super duper better, i guess. I will do a side by side comparison and post the results here. I, too, use both QP202 and CC24 with a 5D and a 5DII, so I will perform the comparison with those cameras as well.

As of now, the QPCalibration application only produces dcp profiles, but there is supposed to be a "plug in" that you can purchase to produce ICC profiles as well. The QP Store says that they are "sold out" of the plug in, whatever that means - maybe it is not available yet.

The one solution I have found that permits the use of the QP and CC24 to make ICC profiles is the profiling capability in Raw Photo Processor, based on ArgyllCMS. Once you make an input file of the Lab values for the QP (which are listed on the back of the card) you can use the QP to profile your camera from within RPP and then save and use that custom profile in RPP for raw conversion. You can alos convert dcp to ICC with the command line utility "dcp2icc".

kirk