Camera Profiling with ColorEyes

So if you listen to the “experts” camera profiling can’t possibly work. It’s too expensive, to time consuming and on and on and on. The problem with all of these “experts” is they have never tried Coloreyes. Cameras have always been treated like scanners, so perfect reproduction of the target was the object of the exercise. Shooting the target was treated like a simple copy job with very little in depth instruction.

Three years ago we built this product from the ground up using some very different concepts. Two major changes in the way we approached this process dramatically changed the quality and universality of custom camera profiles. First, shooting the target needed to be done in a far more controlled fashion. The quality of the data captured had a dramatic impact on the viability of the profile. Hence the manual that ships with ColorEyes explains in great detail how to shoot the target.

Second, the assumption that accurate reproduction of the target was at the heart of a good profile is a fatal error. Digital cameras, like film create an image with contrast higher than our perception. We have come to expect a certain tonal range and contrast in images we like. Building a profile to reproduce a target exactly takes away that nice S curve of tonal values we have come to expect, and instead we get a profile that changes those values. This is the root of the comments about camera profiling being too flat. Allow the profiler to reproduce the target exactly and what you get will not make you happy.

Coloreyes is based on the premise that tonal values captured by your camera should not be messed with. We also firmly believe and have proven over and over again that one profile can work extremely well under a huge range of conditions. So there is no need to make a huge amount of profiles. One good one will do the trick.

Click for more info on camera profiling.