Develop module Why is Adobe Standard profile so bland lately?

[ilarionmoga]

Lightroom Version Number

12.5

Operating System

1. Windows 11

Hello everyone!

I am posting here a question that is bothering me since the beginning of my Lightroom usage: Why is Adobe Standard profile so bland lately?

I know Adobe used different algorithms for Adobe Standard profiles back in the days, so much that Canon 5DII or %DSR or Nikon D700 or D200 look so, so much different than todays cameras like the R5 or the Z8 in Adobe Lightroom. I know, they also have the Adobe Color, but that doesn't cut it, most XMP profiles are having the Adobe Standard as the base profile in order to work with all cameras range.

And no, the color filter array is not the problem, in fact, today's sensors CFAs are better than the old CCD and CMOS CFA, hands down, no argument, like the D200 or the 5DSR.

I found a workaround, I use Lumariver Profile Designer and I replace the Adobe Standard profile with my instructions from the profile I have created in Lumariver and it works flawlessly now, but it's frustrating that Adobe is doing such a bad job at creating good profiles. I understand the MelissaRGB, aka gamma 2.2 ProPhoto icc profile is oversaturating colors when editing images, but I ask, why using a profile that is outdated and really bad for editing when there are crazy good profiles out there like the ARRI Wide Gamut or ACES AP1? Why Adobe cannot change the DCP instructions and work in any ICC profile and create color accurate DCP profiles for all cameras that actually match each others colors? That is the point of DCP profiles, anyway, to get accurate colors out of any sensor and to match the colors of any camera! There is no excuse!

Thank you all!

 

[UtahLlama]

I've assumed that Adobe tries harder with the more flagship cameras to create Camera matching DCPs.
I've got a Canon Rebel T7i and almost always prefer the general colour balance of the jpeg compared to any of the Adobe or Camera matching DCPs. But I prefer the flexibility of the RAW so live with taking a bit more time to get the edits right.

If I was doing this professionally it wouldn't put up with it but then I would have a better camera.

I've been pretty deep down one Color Management rabbit hole, creating ICCs for Proofer, Print and Press, and there are so many compromises involved.
I think for most people Lumariver Profile Designer would be a rabbit hole so deep and impenetrable that it's easier to put faith in Adobe's offering.

With photography I only do it for pleasure, with Lightroom I edit to what I see on screen, I can't change the way Lightroom uses DCP and ICC so I don't worry about it, professionally I know exactly how to get the best results from screen to print and the DCP doesn't com in to play at all.
Absolutely if you are taking fashion or museum photos you want the DCP to be as accurate as possible but for most of us I'm not so sure.

I do also think that ICC RGB to ICC cmyk conversions leave a lot to be desired; they always consider the whole space, so sometimes not all the contrast available in the small space is used.

 

[ilarionmoga]

I am not talking about CMYK ICC, I am talking about Lightroom working ICC profile, meaning, the profile in which LR is working the editing. I wish we could change that, C1 has it.

Actually, working with custom DCP profiles is not hard and Lumariver has quite an easy learning curve, the problem is, not everyone is willing to deal with extra care and Adobe should focus more on the quality and accuracy of camera's profiles, especially because they can and they know how to. At least for Adobe, ICC, DCP profiles, are not, or should not be a rabbit hole. For me, it isn't.

 

[UtahLlama]

This might be rubbish but I get the feeling that more people use Lightroom to create a picture that was their artistic vision when they took the shot, rather than get accurate colour. And I think that Adobe works to that concept too. The Adobe Profiles start dull but are supposed to make the editing process predictable and easier to balance.
I understand what you say, if I choose Camera Landscape as my DCP the RAW is over saturated and needs pulling back, it makes editing harder not easier. It would be nice to have a better match to the Camera's jpeg but overall I prefer to be able to pull some highlights back or open up some shadows rather than actually use the Camera's Jpeg.

I'll admit to only having a sketchy understanding of how Camera Profiles work but 10 minutes reading on the Lumariver website certainly didn't make me think "this is easy".

Every time I think I understand Color Management from InDesign to PDF to Inkjet/Toner/Litho something will surprise you.

It may just be that you haven't been deep enough in your rabbit hole to realise you're in one

 

[ilarionmoga]

DCP profiles are a totally different thing than ICC color management. DCP is working in ProPhoto, and I wish I could choose the ICC profile my DCP is working in, but it is what it is...
Well, I find Lumariver easy because I went down the rabbit hole and I pulled myself out of it and gained the superpower of understanding what's going on, still, I didn't went down the rabbit hole of DCAMproof and all the coding stuff. It's way harder...

I wand a certain look in my edits too, in fact, unless I really need accurate colors for some project, I never deliver colors as seen in real life. Though, I really need to have a start on accurate colors before knowing where I want to be with colors, tones and contrast. I found my way though, with Lumariver, but so many people are confused because they like some cameras over the others in Lightroom RAW editing and that has nothing to do with the camera itself, but with how LR is interpreting the colors. I tested out dozens of WAR files with custom profiles. You can literally make any camera to have accurate colors and matching up all of them within 2-5% difference, some even less.

I never liked out of camera JPGs, and I never need the look of jpgs in LR, though, if I would pick one brand, Panasonic would be my choice of JPG color quality, and on top of that, the ability to use LUTs to have the look you want straight out of camera.

 

[BobT]

This might be rubbish but I get the feeling that more people use Lightroom to create a picture that was their artistic vision when they took the shot, rather than get accurate colour. And I think that Adobe works to that concept too. The Adobe Profiles start dull but are supposed to make the editing process predictable and easier to balance.
I understand what you say, if I choose Camera Landscape as my DCP the RAW is over saturated and needs pulling back, it makes editing harder not easier. It would be nice to have a better match to the Camera's jpeg but overall I prefer to be able to pull some highlights back or open up some shadows rather than actually use the Camera's Jpeg.

I'll admit to only having a sketchy understanding of how Camera Profiles work but 10 minutes reading on the Lumariver website certainly didn't make me think "this is easy".

Every time I think I understand Color Management from InDesign to PDF to Inkjet/Toner/Litho something will surprise you.

It may just be that you haven't been deep enough in your rabbit hole to realise you're in one

Despite not clear on the acronym DCP, I agree with the points you make in para, 1. Once upon a time, the gold standard was to have the camera produce colour card accurate images. I think this was the purpose of Adobe Standard. It seems times have moved on and the preference is to create something closer to the photographer's "artistic vision" as you call it, rather than reality which, let's face it, is often rather uninspiring... thus Adobe Color".
Some time ago, I posted something similar, pointing out, in the case of ORF files, how dull Adobe's camera matching profiled were compared to the camera's jpegs. I shoot raw but would like to start editing from a base similar to the camera's jpegs. In your case it seems the camera matching profiles offered are oversaturated.

 

[UtahLlama]

So I went down a new rabbit hole and found Blake from f64 Academy chipping away with a pick-axe!
Synchronicity maybe?
It may be what you are trying to achieve is already in ACR and Photoshop, certainly Blake chooses AdobeRGB as his icc Profile, but I'm unclear how this influences the Develop module.
If nothing else the bit at the start that explains the Order that ACR and LR apply edits is knowledge worth having but pretty much the whole thing is new to me!
I'm also deriving that the MelissaProPhotoRGB.icc is only really supplying tone curve and start and end points for RGB. What you do when you create a custom dcp is alter the underlying maths of how all the other RGBnumbers are generated before edits (but after grading)

https://youtu.be/Tlvqe2L5iro?si=K7WRA469SEUmfb-Q

 

[clee01l]

It may be what you are trying to achieve is already in ACR and Photoshop, certainly Blake chooses AdobeRGB as his icc Profile, but I'm unclear how this influences the Develop module.

Let's not confuse Color Profiles with Camera profiles. A color profile is an envelop of Colors available to an image. Sometimes called a gamut which is the complete range or scope of colors.

Both Lightroom and Photoshop use a exotic version of ProPhoto RGB (called Melissa RGB) as its working color space SRGB is an old display standard that most monitor can show. AdobeRGB is a generic print standard the some newer monitors can display. Apple Displays are able to meet the DCI-P3 standard.
All of this has nothing to do with a camera Profile except that a camera profile needs to conform and be assigned to a color profile. RAW image data has no RGB component and no camera profile until it has been converted (demosaic'd ) to RGB pixels. Then the software doing the conversion will mapt the pixel values into a defined color profile Both Lightroom and Photos shop use ProphotoRGB as their color space out of the ACR conversion of the RAW data.

Now, what is a camera Profile. In Camera, the tiny computer needs to convert the RAW Photo site datavalues in to RGB pixels and save that as a JPEG. In your camera before you click the shutter you set up a camera profile for the JPEGs that your camera will produce. The manufacturer assigns different names describing the apearance of the JPEG image it will produce. Adobe has emulated these (reverse engineered) and they are see in the profile list as Camera Landscape, Camera Vivid, Camera Neutral, Camera Standard etc. In Addition to those Adobe has developed their own profiles for Adobe Landscape, Adobe Vivid, Adobe Standard etc. Lightroom applies one of these on import as a starting point in the edit process. Since the image is a RAW image and none of this is baked in, you can change these profiles in the Basic panel.

In the develop process, you start with ProPhotoRGB as the working or computational color space. Your monitor however may not be able to render the colors properly that fall outside of the Color profile assigned to the monitor BUT, edits may make adjustments that do fall outside of colors that the monitor is capable of displaying.
What you see on the screen is limited to your color managed monitor and your App displaying the image. At export time you will create a derivative image file and need to assign a color profile appropriate to the intended destination of the image.
For an image shown on web browsers on monitors of unknown color management or capability, you want to use sRGB and the colors in the image will be adjusted to fit inside the sRGB envelop shown in the diagram above.
For an image to be printed you want to use a color profile to match the paper and printer characteristics, If these are unknown, you can use AdobeRGB.

 

[UtahLlama]

Hi Clee ,
I might be wrong but I think its Lightroom and ACR that share the exotic ProphotoRGB but Photoshop uses the vanilla version.

icc doesn't only include the gamut and tone curve .
As an example FOGRA51 and FOGRA39 share the same solid colours and I believe tone curve, but they can give quite different colours when converting from the same RGB starting point.

The video has nothing really to do with icc profile, its just that its one of the choices when saving the CUBE file (from Photoshop) which becomes a LUT forming part of a new DCP (from ACR via the Presets). The video walks through all the steps to make a custom DCP with the first two example images suffering with quite common issues with greens (for me anyway).
I just thought that the original poster might get something out of it, because it gives you a new starting point where they feel Adobe Standard DCP is lacking. Its certainly not lesson 101 and not for everyone but I thought it produced good results and Blake is great at explaining complicated stuff.

 

[clee01l]

I might be wrong but I think its Lightroom and ACR that share the exotic ProphotoRGB but Photoshop uses the vanilla version.

Admittedly, I was giving a high level overview of Adobe's practices wrt color profiles. You might be technically correct. You can't open a RAW file Photoshop so ACR is always the front end.

The OP topic is the Adobe Standard profile and this is a camera profile not color profiles. So, Color Spaces are irrelevant to the topic.

 

[SunnyUK]

I would suggest that if accurate colours is the aim, then the photographer should spend 30 seconds at the beginning of the set on taking a well lit picture of a colorchecker (e.g. Calibrite or Datacolor), and then at home in front of the computer spend 60 seconds at the beginning of the editing session on producing a profile based on this test image and assign said profile to all the images from that set.

No canned profile, no matter of who has developed it, can know what the light falling on the subject looked like.

(edited to fix an embarrasing typo)

 

[rebop]

Rather than start a new thread, I'd like to tag on here.

Did an outdoors, sunny shoot yesterday and every shot is so disappointing. Was not that way even 6 months ago and before when I had the develop profile set one way and never even thought to change it. Now I am dissatisfied with EVERY develop profile.


All of the Canon's are not real. Canon Standard perhaps the worst and exaggerates saturation. Yet Adobe Color increases the black and white levels and has a flat appearance. NONE of them work for me and it truly was never this way. And no matter how I correct, I cannot get the pleasing results I got just a few months ago. At a loss for what to do??

SO, as often happens, after I post I find something. This time even before I post!!

I used to use EMBEDDED? Now cannot find that any longer. Going to go look for that. Was never an issue. And I find I would occassionally use some of the Adobe's and all results better than today's choices.

In case I cannot find it, where IS embedded now?

 

[rebop]

OK - forgive a senior moment.

ALL of my developed images with EMBEDDED are tifs! But I cannot recall why I ever imported tifs and changed from RAW???? Same camera. Same Lightroom except for updates.

Where and why might I have made the choice to change from CR3 RAW to TIF?

A little progress

 

[rebop]

OK, here is what I think happened.

Once I got my R3, Lightroom 6 would not import CR3 files. So I had to open in Canon Digital Photo Professionsl, save as TIF and import to Lightroom. LOVED the results!

Then I "took the plunge" and subscribed to Lightroom Classic and could import CR3 files so never did TIF again. And then, August 2023 and for a while after, using the Adobe profiles or even occasional Canon profile I got good results. Then profiles in Lightroom changed and I am VERY displeased.

Whew. Hard sleuthing this this morning.

So, what to do is what it comes down to. I am not as pleased with my work as I was up until maybe October last year. And not sure what to change. And one odd observation: when I open a previous image where I was more than pleased with the developed image now in LRc, the blacks are crushed slightly. They were NOT that way when done back October / November. So even "finished" images come up need new adjustments as LRc updates have changed my results.

What would you try/do??

 

[Zenon]

I have been using Adobe Neutral for the last year which is even more bland that Standard. The author suggests Camera Neutral but I find Auto which is key component plays plays nicer with Adobe Neutral . To give a file a little more life I lower the backs and increase contrast and then tune to taste.

As the author states if something is blown out it is not recoverable, which we all know. Adobe Neutral does not suffer the punchy curves so the sliders do have more range. Any detail that does exist in whites and blacks is not lost as quickly. I find this really impacts the blacks as it does not plug them up. After a year trying Adobe Color or the Camera files does not look as natural to me and I now have trouble going back to the baked profiles. There are exceptions where punchy profiles do work with wildlife like colourful birds where you don't have to worry about losing highlight detail or plugging up the blacks. That can also be corrected in the Basic panel.

https://www.alex-kunz.com/linear-profiles-refutation/

You can get free linear profiles here. I started by testing linear profiles but never warmed up to then. Auto was even worse using them.

https://goodlight.us/linear-profiles.html

 

[rebop]

GREAT reads, thank you. And mirror my experience.

I am going to try Camera Faithful for a starting point and see. I think I am prefering the Canon profiles to the Adobe, but too soon to tell. Without a doubt though, the embedded of the converted TIF is so much better. I do not undertand why nor how to achieve again wiothoiut that long extra step of converting in DPP. Would love some feedback on that.

Gonna read a little more on Linear Profiles, but agree, likely not for me.

 

[Zenon]

I was once a die hard DPP person. The old Canon knows it own raw engine best. I still believe that. When I edited events it was a nightmare starting in DPP and then sending TIFF’s to PS to finish editing. It took a few trials but I finally warmed up to Lightroom 5. Made my life a lot easier. Eventually I just started using Lightroom for all editing.

I don’t do events anymore but I always use DPP to pre-cull before importing files to LrC. You can’t rate them because LrC won’t recognize that. I deleted unwanted files. DPP’s Quick Check -Full Screen is excellent for fit to screen scaling and you see the files as finished JPEGs so sharp and contrasty. Easy to pick out files you don’t want.

 

[rebop]

I agree. BUT, not happy with LRc just yet. Hopefully "yet". Would hate to add more import steps. The tif conversion is painfully slow. Could go grocery shopping and an oil change while waiting.

 

[Zenon]

It may take a little time to pre-cull but when I import I can add my Auto and ISO Adaptive preset. With those two I can produce a decent file in seconds. I did a charity shoot a few years ago. I edited about 500 files in just over an hour.

As for TIFF conversion. Is that exporting as a TIFF, sending to PS or something else?

 

[rebop]

The TIFF conversion simply saves it in the same folder as the CR3's OR if converting from the card saves to a folder I create for importing into LRc. Simple "save as" conversion with no editing to the RAW file.

It really is better than LRc profiles. To the point I have not been able to duplicate reults. But now that I know so much more than I did over coffee this morning, I might have a few more options to try.

 

[clee01l]

I was once a die hard DPP person. The old Canon knows it own raw engine best. I still believe that. When I edited events it was a nightmare starting in DPP and then sending TIFF’s to PS to finish editing.

Most camera manufacturers farm out their Photo processing software to a third party. Often it it the same Japanese company (whose name escapes me at present). That said, Adobe with their rich heritage and background in Photoshop probably has the best handle Phot editing. The only advantage if there is any is in the conversion of RAW photosite values to RGB pixels. Again I have to say that Adobe has the most experience