Improved colours in Lightroom and Camera Raw

Colour profiles is one area where I always felt Adobe Lightroom and Camera Raw could be improved a lot. Rawshooter Premium had the brilliant ColorEngine plug-in with colour profiles from colour wizard Magne Nilsen. I was never able to quite repeat these colours in Lightroom or ACR.

Lightroom colour profile comparisonUntil now. Fortunately Adobe Labs have come to the rescue with their much improved color rendering package. Have a look at this comparison of my Hawk Dreaming landscape, the top photo is the new Adobe Standard beta profile, the bottom photo is the standard Lightroom ACR4.4 profile.

The rendering of red and orange hues is much improved in the new profiles so if you’re a Lightroom 2.0 or Camera Raw (you need to get at least version 4.5) user waste no time, download the profiles and follow the instructions from the Adobe Labs page and enjoy much improved colours! I recommend using the "’Adobe Standard beta’ profile in the package but try them all and see what you like best.

6 Comments on “Improved colours in Lightroom and Camera Raw”

  1. Have you tried the DNG Profile Editor? Here are some links:
    https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.c
    http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/accesso

    I gather you've used the pre-made profiles. Personally, I shot one of those 24-patch Gretag MacBeth color checkers under tungsten and under daylight (actually diffused flash), then fed them into the Profile Editor calibration routine. That was the magic sauce for my D300 color issues — especially with skin tones. If the canned profiles are doing the trick, great. If not, you might want to try this. The GMB color targets are a bit pricey, but for me, this was worth every penny.

  2. Hi Dirk and thanks for the tip! The original Lighteoom profiles did not do it for me but these Adobe Labs profiles are brilliant! With skintones I can see the need to do custom profiles but for landscapes the new Labs profiles are great.

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