Olympus profiles in LR 5.3

[thebatman]

Been playing around with the new Olympus camera profiles in LR 5.3, and have to say I'm very impressed.  Kudos to Eric Chan and/or any others at Adobe who made these happen!  For some images I'm getting better color and contrast results than I've been able to get on my own (although that may say more about my PP skills than anything else .  Makes me want to go back and re-process a bunch of my EM-5 favorites to see what results it would give.

I'd be interested in learning more if anyone knows how these profiles are developed.  Does Adobe do it manually via trial and error or are they able to access the "recipes" from the camera makers themselves?  And what is going on under the hood: are the profiles basically all combinations of tone curves, hue/saturation, and other standard controls, or is there more going on?

Cheers,
Ken

[Vladimirovich]

And what is going on under the hood: are the profiles basically all combinations of tone curves, hue/saturation, and other standard controls, or is there more going on?

use dcptool written by SandyMC... you shall see how those profiles are constructed and how they are different from Adobe Standard

Adobe of course has some in house software that can generate the necessary LUT quite automatically to imitate those OEM renderings sufficiently close... they can either shoot a target with mutliple patches, feed that to OEM raw converter (in camera / off camera) and then just use its output as a target for imitation __OR__ they can produce a synthetic raw file (files) with sensels imitating various colors "captured" by camera (so that after demosaicking they get the necessary variety of scene-referred colors) and do the same process to imitate the OEM rendering...

[Denis de Gannes]

So then the awnser is Adobe is doing their own thing to create profiles to emulate the Olympus renditions.

They do not have access to "are they able to access the "recipes" from the camera makers themselves?"

[Schewe]

So then the awnser is Adobe is doing their own thing to create profiles to emulate the Olympus renditions.

Well, of course...both Thomas & Eric are really experts at this stuff. They have decoded over 300 cameras' raw files so they've gotten pretty good at discovering how sensors work and how other software converts raw files. However, exactly how they do that is, of course, proprietary...Eric might answer (if he feels so inclined) but one clue is what Vladimirovich mentioned about synthetic raw file. They also have access to really expensive, state of the art technical equipment that few have access to. One term I would use to associate with what Thomas and Eric does is...magic.

(which isn't really magic but simply technology and smarts so that what they do seems to be magic).

[Denis de Gannes]

Thanks Jeff, I appreciate the informed comment.

[davidedric]

As Arthur C. Clarke had it "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic",  though he neglected to mention the smarts