Professional Users and Nikon Camera Profiles

[dondi]

Hi all, a question to mainly professionals out there working in the field using lightroom.

Was wondering what you which camera profiles you were using for your NEFs.

I do seem to use camera standard as it renders a lot of colours a lot more accurately, particularly for fashion as it is a little misleading to use adobe standard due to its horrendous interpretation of reds and the like. I have been pulled up on this before with a red garment. Designers are particularly fussy when it comes to the colour of their designs!

To put my mind at ease, was wondering if many of the pros out there with workflows including many operatives (digital assistants, retouchers) were using the camera standard profile.

I have read about creating your own profile. I haven't ventured down this path yet, but was wondering if I should start to bother. Lets put this in perspective - wouldn't have adobe, with a huge software development team, have gotten this right before someone like me sits there with a colour chart creating my own?

Would appreciate the feedback.

[JRSmit]

You can use camera neutral as a starting point. eric Chan has publisched a version 3 beta of some nikons ( d3 and d700 i believe), which i prefer actually. I use D700 .  For fashion, beauty and portraits is shoot in studio conditions and always make a camera profile using xrite color checker passport and DNG Profile Editor from Adobe labs. Reason is color correctness and saturation, also use it for color balance with setting color temperature.
If properly executed it is all about using the cameraprofile, setting the color temp and whitepoint and black point, and color wise you are done. Other settings as tone curve, sharpening, lens corrections need to be done, but have little to do with color.

[Ellis Vener]

When more accurate color renditions are really important -as in your case - that is the time to pull out the 24 patch ColorChecker Chart and make a custom profile for that specific camera and lighting combination. The Adobe DNG Profile editor has a  more powerful and targetable (i.e. subtle) set of controls  than the ColorChecker Passport software but both do a general job very well in my experience.

[dondi]

Thanks for the responses guys.

I updated lightroom to the latest ACR and I note that the v4 profiles are quite good.  These are probably good enough for weddings and events which sover a spectrum of lighting conditions which can not easily accommodate me using a colorchart.

Otherwise, a colorchart looks like a worthy investment for studio portrait and fashion sessions.

What absolutely stumps me is what is the use of the adobe standard profile? What was it calibrated with and under what conditions? It doesn't seem to be accurate enough for a majority of things. Further, what is the ACR 4.6 profile and the difference between is and the adobe standard profile?