Lightroom 6. Adobe Standard vs Camera Standard, Camera Faithful

Would be nice if this was a the top of the list as opposed to scrolling down to the bottom of the panels but anyway......
As Canon users we hear that the Adobe Standard profile has its goods and bads. Sure it's flat and a little lifeless and it is Adobe's conversion.
However with Camera Standard, in many Portraits (not Portrait preset) skin tones can appear to be a bit harsh and saturated. this is wher Camera Faithful may come in nicely.
So I will ask, which are you using as your primary, Abobe Standard, Camera Standard, or Camera Faithful........or like me............It depends........
Thanks.

None of the above... I profiled my camera's sensors using the Xrite Colorchecker Passport and their profiling software, for several different shooting conditions

Me, too...None of the Above. In fact, what are you referring to as "Abobe Standard, Camera Standard, or Camera Faithful"?...I use LF 5.7 and find no LR supplied presets that go by those names!

I have my own presets for shots in Daylight vs. Incandescent vs. CFL for WB settings, and lower ISO vs. very high ISO for noise reduction settings. But pretty standardized for Contrast, Vibrance, and Saturation regardless of photo purpose (product shot vs. portraiture vs. scenic)

I set the camera to Faithful and have a import preset that selects Camera Faithful. That way I'm starting with what I saw on the LCD and work from there. Otherwise I felt like I was starting from scratch.

Wilt wrote in post #18381247
Me, too...None of the Above. In fact, what are you referring to as "Abobe Standard, Camera Standard, or Camera Faithful"?...I use LF 5.7 and find no LR supplied presets that go by those names!

I have my own presets for shots in Daylight vs. Incandescent vs. CFL for WB settings, and lower ISO vs. very high ISO for noise reduction settings. But pretty standardized for Contrast, Vibrance, and Saturation regardless of photo purpose (product shot vs. portraiture vs. scenic)

Wilt the Profiles are in the bottom section of the Develop module right hand toolbar, called Camera Calibration. The first option is Process Version, which generally for version 4 and later will be PV 2012. The next option is the camera profile, which IIRC in versions before LR4 when PV2012 was introduced was limited to a couple of different versions of an Adobe profile. With the introduction of PV 2012 Adobe introduced a range of Camera profiles, that try to match the various different profiles that camera manufacturers provide in camera. In the case of Canon cameras, the only ones I have direct experience with, they are named for the Canon Picture Styles. So where Canon has Picture Styles called Faithful, Landscape, Portrait, Standard, and Neutral, Adobe has profiles with matching names, with the prefix Camera. You also have the Adobe Standard profile, which perpetuates the traditional Adobe look.

It is also possible to create a custom profile for your camera using a specific test target, of known exact colours. Using a custom profile, with a fully colour managed workflow, will ensure that your results accurately reflect the colours of the subject. This can be very important for things like advertising, or product photography, where an exact match to the subject colours is required. The previously mentioned X-rite Colorchecker target is probably the most used of the test targets used for generating a profile. The profile can be made using the exact light that is being used to ensure that the colours are 100% accurate, but you will still have to do WB correctly even if you use a custom profile.

When creating presets you can include both the Process Version, and the profile as options. Actually Adobe show a message that suggests that you should always specify a PV in a preset, but personally I think that is often OTT, but if you include adjustments in a preset that are specific to a PV then I suppose that settings the PV can be useful. I tend not to bother though, since my import default is to use PV 2012 anyway.

As to the original question, I mostly just use Adobe Standard, as it is not too saturated. Sometimes though I will use a different profile. I keep meaning to get a Colour Checker, and when I do I will probably generate a couple of custom profiles. One for daylight, one for tungsten, and probably a third for my studio strobes.

Alan

Thx Alan. Now I need to play around a bit with the Camera Calibration settings and see how the choice of settings (Adobe Standard vs. Canon Faithful) alter my perceptions and subsequent adjustment of the photo, by playing around with two virtual copies.

I shoot RAW, and I have my 7DII set to Faithful for the purposes of glancing at the histogram once in a long while. My LR 5.7 used the default of Adobe Standard setting under Camera Calibration, but I created a virtual copy and set Camera Faithful. Here are the two, side by side (left Faithful, right Adobe Standard)

Wilt wrote in post #18381440
Thx Alan. Now I need to play around a bit with the Camera Calibration settings and see how the choice of settings (Adobe Standard vs. Canon Faithful) alter my perceptions and subsequent adjustment of the photo, by playing around with two virtual copies.

I shoot RAW, and I have my 7DII set to Faithful for the purposes of glancing at the histogram once in a long while. My LR 5.7 used the default of Adobe Standard setting under Camera Calibration, but I created a virtual copy and set Camera Faithful. Here are the two, side by side (left Faithful, right Adobe Standard)

Certainly Adobe Standard is far from 'flat and a little lifeless'!

I have to admit that when I look at the real Macbeth Colorchecker and look at the two images and compare to the actual target, the Camera Faithful is closer to the real thing than Adobe Standard...Adobe Standard produces 'more electric' Orange and Orange Yellow, yellow Green, Blue and Cyan patches than the real target. (My Saturation setting by default is +20)
In trying out the setting with a real scene shot recently, while the difference can be seen, I cannot say that I prefer one setting over the other, however.

Wilt might I suggest that you try turning down the saturation to 0 when comparing the different camera profiles. Changing the profile can have a very significant effect on the saturation of certain colours. For example Landscape tends to boost greens and blues, while portrait tends to push the reds a little, for better skin tones. My default conversion now has Clarity 25, Vibrance 20, and Saturation 0. I much prefer the results of boosting vibrance over using the saturation slider.

If am not surprised that you are seeing saturation issues with the oranges and yellows, There is one aerobatic display team, that use wing walkers here in the UK that have an orange livery, and one of our preserved P51 Mustangs has a yellow nose, and they actually need to have the orange/yellow saturation reduced, even when using the least saturated profiles. Depending on the subject I find that the "flattest" profiles saturation wise is a toss up between Adobe Standard, and Camera Faithful. I used to muck about looking at different profiles, but mostly now I have settled on Adobe Standard, since it seems least likely of all of the choices to push any particular colour into clipping. When I have subjects that I know will cause issues I will often use the primary adjustments in the calibration section, pushing the red hue over to the right, and pulling back on the saturation seems to fix most of the bright paint colours that cause my problems.

When I'm working with these difficult colours I will often do a "Soft Proof" even for onscreen reproduction in sRGB, since the clipping I'm referring to is gamut, not exposure. This is especially useful now that I have a wide gamut monitor, when my monitor gamut was a bit less than sRGB it was sometimes very obvious that there were OOG colours. Some of the yellows and oranges that I have issues with will only fit in ProPhotoRGB, they show as clipped in just about any other colour space, including AdobeRGB.

Alan

BigAl007 wrote in post #18382542
Wilt might I suggest that you try turning down the saturation to 0 when comparing the different camera profiles. Changing the profile can have a very significant effect on the saturation of certain colours. For example Landscape tends to boost greens and blues, while portrait tends to push the reds a little, for better skin tones. My default conversion now has Clarity 25, Vibrance 20, and Saturation 0. I much prefer the results of boosting vibrance over using the saturation slider.

Alan, in fact both Vibrance and Saturation (and, in fact, all settings except for Brightness and Contrast and WB settings) were set to Zero for the above screenshots!

I typically use all the camera calibration settings except adobe standard and portrait. Depends on the photo!

Each saved photo gets it's day in processing (whatever that processing may be); I have no deadlines to keep.

What really matters is end result. If your end result is print, then sample different processing methods with the same photograph, print them and see which PP method best suits your end result.

jason

Wilt wrote in post #18382615
Alan, in fact both Vibrance and Saturation (and, in fact, all settings except for Brightness and Contrast and WB settings) were set to Zero for the above screenshots!

Wilt I only just twigged when rereading the thread that you might still be using Process Version 2010, is that the case, or have you moved to using PV2012? I know you were using LR3 until very recently when you got your new 7D, so you probably have a lot of images that are already processed in PV2010. Which is how I would leave them unless they could really benefit from improved highlight detail.

PV2012 drops the Brightness and Recovery sliders, in favour of the four Highlights/Whites and Shadows/Blacks, which IMO are a great improvement, especially if you are having to deal with images with lot of dynamic range. I like PV2012 a lot better than PV2010, even if you do have to accept the auto-adaption that Adobe uses, I'll go with results I like, over mathematical certainty about the processing that is applied to the image.

I also use Faithful, with the optional sliders at the lowest settings in camera, just to try to get a useable histogram. Sometimes I'll even use UniWB as well just to make sure of things. I was playing with the camera the other week and did notice a really big difference between when the in camera blinkies started by using UniWB, IIRC it was well over a stop.

Alan

I moved up to LR 5.7 and adopted Process 2012 when I purchased the 7DII.
So my comments in Post 6 were within the context of LR 5.7 and process 2012 settings.

I still have my presets from process 2010 applied for all images taken prior to using LR5.7, and then have new presets specifically for process 2012 and images taken with the 7DII. The new presets all have settings set to Zero, with the exception of Vibrance and Saturation...but after prolonged use of Camera Faithful I may (or may not) decide to alter the default values in my presets for those two settings. I may end up with a dual approach analogous to my film shooting days...
EPP for general shooting, but selecting EPN when I need absolutely the best 'faithful' color rendition for product shots. For example, I might end up with something like...

• Camera Faithful (unaltered) for for product shooting
  
• Camera Faithful (with Vibrance and Saturation alterations) for general shooting
  

Wilt since you have the colour checker I would have thought that making your own camera profile would have been the absolute best way to ensure accurate colour for things like product shots. It is supposedly a very simple thing to do, since you only need to shoot the colour checker card, and then run it through the free software. This would ensure that your profile exactly matched your camera for the best possible colour rendition. Although you do still have to apply WB correctly too, as that is separate from the profile.

Alan

BigAl007 wrote in post #18391763
Wilt since you have the colour checker I would have thought that making your own camera profile would have been the absolute best way to ensure accurate colour for things like product shots. It is supposedly a very simple thing to do, since you only need to shoot the colour checker card, and then run it through the free software. This would ensure that your profile exactly matched your camera for the best possible colour rendition. Although you do still have to apply WB correctly too, as that is separate from the profile.

Alan

But I have a cardboard MacBeth Colorcheker, and not the newest plastic Colorchecker Passport.
That, plus the fact that I purchased my MacBeth Colorchecker in the days of film, and now in the digital age I do not do product shots with anywhere near the frequency of old. I dare say, the concepts of color accuracy do not have the same visibility it did when emulsion selection had a large impact upon color reproduction.

Wilt wrote in post #18381440
Thx Alan. Now I need to play around a bit with the Camera Calibration settings and see how the choice of settings (Adobe Standard vs. Canon Faithful) alter my perceptions and subsequent adjustment of the photo, by playing around with two virtual copies.

I shoot RAW, and I have my 7DII set to Faithful for the purposes of glancing at the histogram once in a long while. My LR 5.7 used the default of Adobe Standard setting under Camera Calibration, but I created a virtual copy and set Camera Faithful. Here are the two, side by side (left Faithful, right Adobe Standard)

Certainly Adobe Standard is far from 'flat and a little lifeless'!

I have to admit that when I look at the real Macbeth Colorchecker and look at the two images and compare to the actual target, the Camera Faithful is closer to the real thing than Adobe Standard...Adobe Standard produces 'more electric' Orange and Orange Yellow, yellow Green, Blue and Cyan patches than the real target. (My Saturation setting by default is +20)
In trying out the setting with a real scene shot recently, while the difference can be seen, I cannot say that I prefer one setting over the other, however.

Funny you mention that Wilt.
As I have now been Importing my old Aperture Raw files into Lightroom I have noticed a big difference in the Adobe Standard. Importing images by date going back in time, I am now importing images from 2012. These images and prior to 2009 were captured on my old 7D's. The Adobe Standard is more of what you are seeing compared to the Adobe Standard for the 5D Mark III.