Identifying sensors from Adobe DCP Camera Profiles

Risuaita Telkkämäki

Adobe just released Lightroom 5.7 update, which includes support for several new camera models.

One of the new models is Fujifilm X100T. As I do own the previous X100S model, I was wondering if the new model has a same sensor or if it is different. There’s no way to tell that from specifications, even though it looks very much like same one.

Then I had a out-of-the-box idea: Adobe does supply camera profile for each model, which describes how the sensor image colors map to Adobe Standard colors. Each sensor technology has different profile, and if the color profile matches, the sensor then has similar color rendition and most likely uses the same technology (same CFA, same analog circuitry). Of course, this is only Adobe’s interpretation, but I trust them to have direct communication with the camera manufacturers.

So, here’s a list of duplicate Adobe camera profiles, grouped together by those which are exactly same, apart from the model name. I find it interesting that Canon 6D and 70D have identical colors (while being physically different size) and this seems to confirm that Fujifilm X100S and X100T are indeed the same sensor.

UPDATE Dec 15, 2014

CameraRaw 8.7.1 was just released, which contains new profile for Sony ILCE-7M2 – also known as Sony Alpha 7 mk II. Again, this color profile is identical to previous A7 model.

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Red/Blue Swap in Lightroom for Infrared Photography

550nm IR filter
Lately, I’ve been interested in infrared photography (I even modified by E-P1 for full spectrum use), and I’d like to share one of my special tricks for other Lightroom users interested in infrared photography.

I have several IR filters for blocking visible lights, e.g. 550nm, 720nm and 950nm filters. The 950nm filter produces grayscale IR images, but the other filters do produce fake colors, which sometimes make the result much more interesting.

Here’s an example of a shot with 550nm filter, processed as follows, from left to right:

  1. Daylight white balance. The filter has a heavy orange tint
  2. Custom WB, autotone. The tint is gone and sky now shows as dark yellow.
  3. Profile: RedBlueSwap, Custom WB, autotone. Sky is now blue and you can start adjusting photo further.

irkoivu

While this is an old trick in Photoshop, you cannot do this in Lightroom by default. In order to create this effect, I’ve built special Camera Profiles which have color matrices with reversed components. The profiles were created using dcpTool by Sandy McGuffog.

After installing the custom profiles, you will have a new option in Lightroom’s Camera Calibration Profile pulldown menu: RedBlueSwap. Selecting this option will reverse the red and blue channels and hopefully you can skip the slow “Edit in Photoshop” step.

lr_calibration_panel_redblueswap

Installation

Unzip the zip file and copy redblueswap folder to Camera RAW’s profile folder, which is located under your home folder:

Mac OSX:
/Users/yourname/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/CameraProfiles

Windows:
C:/Users/yourname/App Data/Roaming/Adobe/CameraRaw/CameraProfiles

After copying, you need to restart Lightroom before the new profiles are available.

Download

redblueswap_20150909.zip

Sep 20 2015: Updated to match cameras supported by Lightroom 6.1.1