Camera Profiling with ColorEyes, it works and here's why.
Camera profiling is a topic most of us have heard about and argued about. Some of us have been building and using camera profiles for 8-10 years with great success. Others will argue that it is a waste of time, can’t be done. If this were the case, ColorEyes Camera, and for that matter Integrated Color Corp would be long gone. But we’re not. And the reason is the product works, has always worked and will continue to work.
Get Back to Taking Pictures.
Integrated Color Corporation was built on helping the working photographer produce imagery that their customers will approve. The amount of time behind the computer has quickly grown, and the creating great images part is being short changed. Our goal is to find ways to alter that dynamic and help photographers be photographers again, not pixel pushers.
Integrated Color was formed by two partners
with the experience to figure these things out.
Derrick Brown has been in the digital camera business for 20 years in the industrial and commercial photographic markets. He is Phase One’s, and Imacon’s first North American reseller. He has spent the last 10 years working with camera manufacturers to solve real world problems encountered by real customers.
Jack Bingham has been a commercial and industrial photographer for 25 years and has been doing the kind of real world testing required to satisfy this demanding market. We know cameras, raw converters and lighting inside and out
From the start of this digital camera revolution we have been pioneering camera profiling.
Raw Converters and ColorEyes Camera
Profiles can be time saving tools if properly built and applied. Raw converters make this a bit more challenging. Each manufacturer has their own curious outlook on how profiles should be applied. Adobe has decided that camera profiles just plain don’t work and therefore they do not support them. In the end there are a few raw converter makers who have chosen to provide for the use of camera profiles: Phase One, Leaf, Hasselblad/Imacon, Bibble and Iridient’s Raw Developer are the best known.
What the experts say.
1. Cameras behave differently under different light sources so
if you were going to profile you need to make one for each lighting condition
We agree completely with the conclusion here. If you are going to profile scenes then you will forever be stuck profiling scenes. Variable lighting conditions will cause errors in your taget file and profile such that the profile can only work under those specific conditions. Whether a camera changes behavior under different lighting, in our opinion is only a theory for why profiling might not work. If you build a profile using Coloreyes Camera and follow the procedure carefully you can build a maximum of 2 profiles that will work under almost every lighting condition imaginable. The reason we can make profiling work is the approach we designed for shooting the target. How the data is acquired makes all the difference in how the profile behaves.
2. Camera targets can’t possibly contain all the colors a camera can
capture so there has to be a lot of guessing going on.
In order to address this problem we created a glossy target with a lot of deep saturated colors for the largest printable gamut possible. Beyond the confines of the colors in the target it’s up to the color scientists to make some intelligent choices about how to extrapolate to a wider gamut like your digital camera. Our color guys have done a very good job.
3. Profiling can only work under very controlled conditions, like a studio.
This suggests that profiles do not function well under various and changing lighting conditions. A conclusion that we disagree with completely. Below you will find several examples that indicate just the opposite. The problem all the skeptics face is that they create profiles without enough control over the lighting conditions they are being made in. The more variables you eliminate the more universal the profile becomes.
4. Profiling is only beneficial if you are shooting artwork.
Photographers who shoot artwork are no doubt the people who need profiling the most. Their business is reproducing colors from a known source for a critical customer base. The photographer who shoots shoes, sweaters, toys and for that matter skin are all under similar pressures however. Cameras, out of the box are not going to be as accurate as they can be without a good profile, or a lot of fooling around on the computer. We want you to have the choice.
5. Camera Profiling is too time consuming and can never pay back the effort.
Again we agree with the “experts.” If you profile scenes then you need to be profiling all the time, and you’ll need to be keeping track of all those profiles. If however you spend even several hours building your one or two ColorEyes profiles, the savings in editing time will quickly dwarf your profiling time. We feel strongly that a well made profile will save you 80-90 percent of your color editing time. Images are so much closer to where they need to be right out of the first raw conversion that you have time to make better choices and improve your bottom line.
6. Photographers today want to “tweak” their images for a particular look so profiling is just a waste of time.
There are two different ways to look at this. The first is it doesn’t matter where you start because you’re going to mess around with the images so much. The other way to look at it is why start with a bunch of colors that aren’t in the neighborhood when you could start with a more accurate image and alter from there.
ColorEyes Camera profiling.
Get it right.
Less color correction,
more time to shoot.
ColorEyes Camera includes a profiling target & Photoshop Plugin, an extensive manual for shooting the target and building your profile, plus a ColorEyes GelCard for gray balancing your pictures.
ColorEyes Camera is offered in two versions, Commercial and 20/20. Each 20/20 target is measured to create a custom reference file for utmost accuracy, while the Commercial target is delivered with a batch reference file. Most photographers will be extremely satisfied with Commercial. A photographer who shoots paintings/fine art for a living would benefit from the extra accuracy of ColorEyes 20/20.
ColorEyes Camera
If your clients demand accurate color, ColorEyes (20/20) will save you hours in Photoshop and plenty of aggravation.
- nikondigital.org