Camera Profile in Lightroom

[Rendezvous]

Hello,
I've been using a custom profile for my cameras in Lightroom, created using a ColorChecker Passport. Generally they don't seem too different from the Adobe Standard profile, but there are visible differences. When I make a profile in daylight, the tint slider always seem to end up in the 20s, whereas with the Adobe created profiles it's generally 5-10. Is this a normal thing and what others see? I like the created profiles, but sometimes I have trouble with the tint adjustment and getting it to look right.

Screenshot of Adobe Standard vs my custom profile attached.

[digitaldog]

Let's see a Macbeth from the two.

[Rendezvous]

Adobe Standard and Custom profiles.

[Alexey.Danilchenko]

When I make a profile in daylight, the tint slider always seem to end up in the 20s, whereas with the Adobe created profiles it's generally 5-10. Is this a normal thing and what others see?

In short yes - it is normal. They will be different due to the nature of ACR/LR approach to whitebalancing (unless of course you re-use the same colour matrix in your DCP profiles as Adobe ones are using).

A longer explanation is going to introduce you to Adobe's implementation of white balancing. The temperature/tint calculations in ACR/LR are profile dependent and when you use them for white balancing, ACR/LR will calculate in reverse the necessary per channel exposure corrections applied to raw file using the current profile matrix (the actual white balancing). Doing it this way is really rubbish approach to do WB because the only consistency you will get across various profiles will be only for As Shot whitebalance (where ACR/LR maps per channel exposure correction recorded by camera into temperature/tint rather than the other way around).

[digitaldog]

Adobe Standard and Custom profiles.

Better comparison and you can see how the orange and red in the custom profile as an example, is a bit better but wouldn’t be visible on the airplane shot you provided. The custom is based on this example, better IMHO.
The numbers will vary based on the converter and the fact the numbers are describing a range of colors, not a specific color.


http://digitaldog.net/files/22Thecolorofwhite.pdf

[Rendezvous]

Ok good, thanks for your replies!

[Tim Lookingbill]

Processing over 1000 Raws of images shot outdoors using both the daylight DNG custom camera profile and Adobe Standard and the original default profile for my camera (ACR4.4) going back as far as CS3, I see these differences quite often, some as subtle as yours and some not so subtle.

It comes down to whether you like a greenish or pinkish white balance of non-Xrite CCchart scenes such as your posted sample. I've been working on a similar image shot years ago and processing in CS5 ACR6.7 and it's of a scene under a clear blue sky and sun at about  45 degree off horizon where I manually WB'ed with a WhiBaL gray card. The results in ACR previews are similar to yours but more pronounced because AdobeStandard with my 2006 DSLR Pentax K100D tends to neutralize all warm hues but will add more green in the blues and lighten them which is what you're seeing in the top version.

It comes down to how much green does one want to see in a regular daylight shot using either the camera's auto WB or manually setting it incamera with a neutral target. A camera profile can't possibly correct for this level of subtle WB differences out in the field. There's going to be some colors that look correct and some that are slightly off. The fact that we can get such close to perfectly rendered images today I consider a miracle as well as the software that gets it quite close.