New to Camera Profiling?
Camera Profiling Basics (page 1 of 3)
What's a camera profile?
In simple terms a camera profile is a file that can be used to define how a digital image will be displayed or printed. A camera profile is a file that defines how your camera responds to color in a general sense. If you think of what your camera can capture as a 3 dimensional "bucket of color" then what a profile does is measure and define the shape of the bucket. If you can measure how your camera "sees" then you can use a profile to correct for any errors it might have in it's color vision.
So why profile your camera?
That's actually a pretty simple question to answer. Each camera is unique. Most camera manufacturers attempt to apply some sort of correction set to the files their cameras create. Unfortunately they apply the same corrections to every camera so it is not a very good solution. Frequently the files that are created need a great deal of adjustment to be accurate. The two examples shown here illustrate the point pretty well. Figure 1 is a raw file from a Phase One H20 camera and figure 2 is the same file with profiles applied. You can see there are differences between the raw and profiled files. Every camera is unique. By building a custom profile you can compensate for the errors in your camera's color vision. In the end what this means is less work for you.
So how does this work
To be very basic about this, when you shoot your Coloreyes target and create a profile using ColorEyes software three things happen. First the software looks at each patch and measures the color the camera saw. Next the software calculates the difference between what the camera saw and what the reference file says the color is supposed to be. Third the software builds the profile which is actually a set of corrections to make the camera "see" more accurately.
Don't I need to profile each scene?
Absolutely not. A camera profile is a measurement of what the camera records in general. If a camera records all reds as too yellow it will do that under any lighting circumstance. Profiling each scene will generate errors in your profile because of how the target is influenced by its surroundings.
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