Profile for Sony A7r II?

[jrp]

The default Adobe Standard profile for the A7r II seems a bit muddy, for my taste. I built alternative profiles with the Xrite Colourchecker Passport using their software and Adobe's. The colours are more pleasing, although the blues can only be described as electric.

Has anyone tried any other profiles? (I have not yet tried the Dcamprof utility.)

[howardm]

you may want to try using the Adobe DNG Profile Editor instead of the XRite generator.  Also, in PS & LR, you can tweak the camera profile to attempt to tame the blues.

[jrp]

Thanks.  As I say, I also have the adobe-generated profile which also ramps up the blues.  I do rather wonder whether the Colourchecker is worth anything more than getting a neutral colour balance, since it seems to produce such overemphasis

[torger]

3 minute profile in the blind from the CC24 this shot: http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/sony-a7r-ii/A7R2hVFAI000050.ARW.HTM
Using this workflow: http://www.ludd.ltu.se/~torger/photography/camera-profiling.html#the_easy_way
You can find binaries in the large DCamProf thread in this forum. It's indeed command line, but it's not that hard to make a decent profile.

Darker blues, less yellow skin tones than Adobe's profile, among other differences.

If you use other white balance than "as shot" you may get white balance shift due to an Adobe quirk. This can be fixed if you desire, discussed here:
http://www.ludd.ltu.se/~torger/photography/camera-profiling.html#white_balance_shift

[torger]

And here's a fake dual dcp (same contents as above) just to avoid Adobe's white balance shift.

[jrp]

Thanks, Anders.  I'll give it a whirl.

[torger]

There are still some issues with super high saturation colors and around clipping, these are DCamProf issues which I'm working on fixing. But for normal images/colors it should work fine.

[jrp]

Thanks for your profiles.  I have also rolled my own.  (Interestingly the profiles are about 1Mb in size, compared with 3kb from Xrite and 54kb from Adobe DNG Profile Editor.)

I used a Colourchecker Passport shot, created the TIFF in DCRAW and straightened / cropped it in Photoshop.

When using scanin with ColorCheckerPassort.cht, the chart was not detected correctly and I had to use ColorChecket.cht.

I did not do any linearization.

The resulting neutral and subtle profiles are virtually identical and very unsaturated in Lightroom.  The profiles that you provided are better: the difference from Adobe Standard is mainly in the blues.  My own profiles seem to have a different colour balance and are duller.

Where the Adobe Standard wins, is that it handles some blown specular highlights better.  They are bright blue in the profiles created by dcamprof.

Further experimentation required ...

[torger]

There are some issues around clipping, which I'm working on fixing but it will take some time. It's probably that you see in the specular highlight issue.

It seems strange that your own profile differs so much from mine, it shouldn't unless you have shot in say tungsten light or something. Could be some workflow issue?

The large size of DCamProf's profiles are due to the tone reproduction operator which needs high resolution to compensate for what the Adobe curve does. X-Rite adopts Adobe's curve straight off so they need no big LUT, I think Adobe DNG editor does the same, but it's impossible to get really good color that way if you ask me. A longer discussion on this is found at:
http://www.ludd.ltu.se/~torger/dcamprof.html#tone_curves

[jrp]

I'd be happy to send you a DropBox folder if you want to take a peek, or PM me if you have another way of getting the files to you.

[torger]

I've sent PM.

Meanwhile here's a new profile which may have fixed the highlight issue. (At least one highlight issue is fixed, was a bug in previous version of the software)

I've added a normal neutral version of profile as before, and one with gamut compression, for normal images you shouldn't see much of a difference, but for ultra-high saturation colors there is.

[torger]

Problem in extreme blue range confirmed (I've got test files). I now know the reason. Will work on a fix.

[torger]

Now the clipping bugs are fixed, profiles attached.

It will still not render those artificial blue lights great, Adobe does it better. However there's always a tradeoff. The reason Adobe can make it better is because they twisted blues a bit away from their actual hue plus desaturated the whole profile. This way you don't end up in an extreme gamut position for that artificial light.

If you want great color in the normal range it's however very hard to make a good transition into that range of artificial lights. My recommendation is therefore to use Adobe's more desaturated profile on those nightscapes where you come across that type of lights.

At some point I may try to make a good compromise and see how far I can come on that but it's a lot of manual work.

By the way, do you remember what color those blue lights were to your eye? Was it deep blue, or was it light cyan? Or was it some other color?

[torger]

Here's updated profiles. The changes are minor, related to DCamProf software changes. Blues will be rendered bit lighter still, and some artifact fixes of neutral plus. There's also some lightness corrections back in, been really careful to not mess up gradients, doesn't make any big change in look though.

[Alex Matiash]

Hello to everyone. I'm looking for a good profile for sony a7rII for C1, because the one C1 is using for this camera is really bad. As far as I know C1 only accepts icm\icc profiles, so dcp can not be used. I would appreciate if somebody here can create icc\icm profile that can be used in C1 from the same data as dcm files mentioned earlier.

[torger]

Hello to everyone. I'm looking for a good profile for sony a7rII for C1, because the one C1 is using for this camera is really bad. As far as I know C1 only accepts icm\icc profiles, so dcp can not be used. I would appreciate if somebody here can create icc\icm profile that can be used in C1 from the same data as dcm files mentioned earlier.

I could do it, the problem however is that I've stopped using C1 and therefore my latest version is 7.2.2 so I can't open A7rII files and thus cannot make a profile for it.

If someone could provide a for-profiling-converted TIFF I could do the first stage, but an additional problem with C1 is that to make a general-purpose profile is a two-step process where you need to design a curve by eye inside C1, and that I can't help with without having a C1 version that can open A7rII files.

If you have some confidence you can create a profile yourself using this workflow:
http://www.ludd.ltu.se/~torger/photography/camera-profiling.html#the_easy_way_c1
Compiled versions of DCamProf can be found in the DCamProf thread in this forum.

A good colorchecke shot can be found here http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/sony-a7r-ii/A7R2hVFAI000050.ARW.HTM

[John Hollenberg]

How does one use these profiles with Lightroom (on Windows)?  Where/how do they get installed?

Here's updated profiles. The changes are minor, related to DCamProf software changes. Blues will be rendered bit lighter still, and some artifact fixes of neutral plus. There's also some lightness corrections back in, been really careful to not mess up gradients, doesn't make any big change in look though.

[torger]

How does one use these profiles with Lightroom (on Windows)?  Where/how do they get installed?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=where+should+I+install+dng+profiles+on+windows

 

[John Hollenberg]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=where+should+I+install+dng+profiles+on+windows

Since I didn't know they are dng profiles, I wouldn't have been able to do that search.  Here is a shorter answer:

Custom-created .DCP profile files go into the following location under your Windows Users folder:

C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\CameraRaw\CameraProfiles

[jrp]

Here's Jim Kasson on the standard Adobe profile Jim's Blog

He finds it a good starting point. I have never really loved the Sony's colours.

A comment on the post point to a way of untwisting the profile, to what benefit one can only speculate.