Create custom camera profile?

littlemike

• 14. November 2006 01:30

I took a stab at creating a custom camera profile for my camera that I could use within CO by ordering a copy of Pictocolor's InCamera, a Photoshop plugin that creates a profile based on your shot of a color target, like the Gretag Macbeth Color Checker chart (or others).

But it turns out that the created profile can't be used in CO because in order to have created the test image to open in Photoshop, you first needed to have told CO what camera profile to us (in my case I used the provided Generic 20D profile). Subsequent uses of the custom profile would then require the same workflow (convert in CO with provided Phase One camera profile, then open in PS with custom camera profile), and there's no way simply use the custom profile in CO. I confirmed this with Pictocolor's tech staff. So it looks like I misunderstood the intent of Pictocolor's inCamera profiling software.

What I'm looking for is a service or program that can create a custom camera profile that I can use directly in CO without having to take the images into PS. Ideas?

--
mike elliott

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  Christopher

  • 14. November 2006 06:04

  Try this:
  
  Get a gray card and a white card to go with your color chip card.
  
  Have your camera set to record JPEGs, disable all sharpening, and color enhancements.
  
  Manually set the exposure on the gray card to obtain proper exposure. Shoot the card for reference. Now put the white card in place of the gray, verify that it is 2 stops above the gray. Shoot it and have the camera use that frame for white balance. Now shoot the color chip card with those same exposure and white balance settings. This will give you a JPEG that you can use to profile the camera under those lighting conditions. Change the camera to raw for the rest of the shoot so you may make use of said profile.
  
  Alternatively, follow the steps above with the camera in raw (or raw+JPEG to try both techniques in one pass) mode, check the first 3 images with Capture One with the color management setting disabled (you can set white balance off the white card or the white square on the chip). You should be able to produce a TIFF with which you can generate a profile to apply to any shots under the same lighting conditions. As a test revisit the color chip raw image once the profile is loaded and the color management re-enabled. Right click over the preview image in Capture One and see what RGB values are displayed. The pure tones should give pretty close to expected numbers.
  
  (I like the stand-alone version of inCamera over the PS plug-in (it supports 16-bit TIFFs), but as long as your TIFF files do not have embedded profiles and the color management is disabled in PS you should be safe--id est, don't invest more money until you see if this works for you.)

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