Lightroom camera profile for concerts?

Hey POTN,

So, I'm quickly realizing that for concert photography, the default "Adobe Standard" profile in Lightroom is really, really terrible for concert photography. I'm looking for something a little more suited toward concert photography. Camera Landscape seems to be okayish, but I'd prefer something a little better.

Does anyone know any profiles for lightroom specifically made for that kind of photography?

I guess that by "concert photography" you don't mean string quartets and Bach lieder.
Download Adobe's DNG Profile Editor. You start with one of the .dcp profiles for your camera and can modify it to suit your taste or needs.

tzalman wrote in post #17124779
I guess that by "concert photography" you don't mean string quartets and Bach lieder.
Download Adobe's DNG Profile Editor. You start with one of the .dcp profiles for your camera and can modify it to suit your taste or needs.

Hahaha, helllllll nawwww.

Thanks bro!

I'm betting the problem is not so much with the profile but with the white balance. Concert stages are usually lit with strange colored lights that defy normal white balance settings. Plus, many stage managers are now using high intensity LED lighting, which presents a whole new set of problems.

When I shot concerts a few years ago, I always found the red channel to be the biggest problem...for some reason, lighting guys seem to LOVE red stage lights.

If the stage has older can lighting with gels over the lights, you'll want to push your WB towards incandescent. Also, if you use flash, be sure to gel it CTO and dial the EC down a stop or two to balance. I never really liked using flash, but some places have insanely dark stages and it was necessary at times.

For LED lighting, you're going to need to watch your color channels in your histogram as you are shooting. If all they have on are blue LEDs, your red and green channel will be almost empty. If you overexpose the blue channel, you'll end up with plastic looking skin tones. I found setting Vibrance to -25ish would recover some detail for slightly overexposed shots.

As far as camera profiles, I would start with Canon Neutral, as I found the Adobe profile exacerbated the problems with the red channel. Beyond that though, I'd have a handful of presets in LR to quickly apply common corrections I found myself using repeatedly, but due to the nature of concert photography and the variety if venues I shot in, there wasn't a common profile I could apply that made sense for most of the shots. Shows ended up needing a lot of individual editing, unfortunately.

A tip: The most neglected part of LR's Develop module is the RGB primaries controls in the Calibration panel. These are temporary (per image) profile modifiers. Historically, they are there because in LR 1 and 2 you didn't have a choice of profiles - there was only the Adobe profile and a lot of people were very unhappy with it, especially its reds. The Calibration settings allowed them to easily set up a variation. Nowadays people switch profiles for different color renderings or go to the HSL panel to alter colors in a narrower range. My impression is that HSL is more linear and Calibration works on a curve, influencing highlights more. It is like moving the "white" point on a single channel curve in the Tone Curve panel, but different because it is applied earlier in the internal workflow, i.e. right at the start, in effect modifying the capture gamut of the sensor before its conversion to Linear ProPhoto RGB.

tzalman wrote in post #17125834
A tip: The most neglected part of LR's Develop module is the RGB primaries controls in the Calibration panel. These are temporary (per image) profile modifiers. Historically, they are there because in LR 1 and 2 you didn't have a choice of profiles - there was only the Adobe profile and a lot of people were very unhappy with it, especially its reds. The Calibration settings allowed them to easily set up a variation. Nowadays people switch profiles for different color renderings or go to the HSL panel to alter colors in a narrower range. My impression is that HSL is more linear and Calibration works on a curve, influencing highlights more. It is like moving the "white" point on a single channel curve in the Tone Curve panel, but different because it is applied earlier in the internal workflow, i.e. right at the start, in effect modifying the capture gamut of the sensor before its conversion to Linear ProPhoto RGB.

I actually routinely use the sliders in the calibration panel. They work better than HSL a lot of the time. I "tune" the overall image with the calibration sliders, and then micro tune it even more with HSL--assuming I'm not too lazy.

Red channels are a bit of a problem to deal with a lot. I had a few problems, but nothing I couldn't overcome. I'd say the lasers were a real problem. They were always "lined" on the edges by a dark color that I couldn't get rid of or dampen. So I just had to deal with them.

I use “Camera Neutral dcpTool Invariant".
Have a look here: http://www.getcolorman​aged.com/lightroom/lig​htroom-blues/