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Camera Defaults and Calibrations

In addition to presets and synchronization, the other thing that's going to save you a lot of time inside of the developed module is the idea of creating calibrations for each camera and customs default settings. So we want to talk about that right now, and we have just about twenty minutes perfect. So the first thing that you have to know is calibrating, and I have two calibration tools that are essential. First calibration tool is a monitor calibrate er so this is the x right? I won display pro, but they also make color monkey what's about half the price. Both of them are excellent, but I'm absolutely calibrated on my screen, so I know what I'm looking at is accurate. So that's the first thing any color management that you do needs to be done with calibration first, so if your monitor hasn't been calibrated, there's no sense in you working, it really isn't because you don't know what you're doing, and so your client may be right when they say that your colors are off, but I know that...

my colors are on. And so if my client says they're off because the client hasn't calibrated their screen, so I know that I'm accurate um so that's the first thing and the by the way x right just made it possible to calibrate your ipad so now if you own one of these a color monkey or anything like that, you can actually put this on the ipad and it literally creates a color profile on the ipad so that you can see what you can show someone this will look like acts on paper and it looked like this when it's in s rgb and it looked like that and so it's amazing I just tested out I love it super fun so so they just made that available so if you already own one of these, your ipad just needs to get you just get the free app and now you can calibrate your your ipad as well. So that's I think, a really great advancement because for now we've all just been trusting that our ipads all right? And I looked in there not there so wrong so it's really cool to see it change too correct? So first calibrate once you've calibrated your screen so you know what you're getting is right on the screen. The other thing that you need to do is calibrate your camera and so that's what this is for and you remember I shot a set of images that we imported our job the first job that we imported here had some had some color so these air color checkers so all I did is photographed this I should have photographed it closer, but I didn't if I could photographic closer it khun khun auto figure it out but what it's looking for when it when it looks at these there's basically that plug in that will just zoom in and find all the color panels and it knows what they're supposed to look like and then it will make calibration for that um but it's looking for these little hash marks see that those little hash marks or what it's looking for to figure out where all these squares they're supposed to be and so if it's too far away and it's not quite sharp, it will it will have a hard time finding those and so then you have to tell it where where it is manually and so in our case what what we've done is we have created one in shade so this one I took a picture in open shade and in this one is full sun and I'm going to calibrate my camera for general outside he's on the way I'm going to do that you can you can calibrated specifically to like if you're shooting indoors or your shooting in a very specific light and it's say clothing or its food or whatever and you need to get the colors accurate take a picture of this before the chute and then calibrate the camera to that chute so that all the light everything is dead on accurate for that one shoot I did that with some trunks that I've been shooting for a high end like old fashion trump dealer on the colors have to be accurate and so I shot this with every shoot this goes in front make sure I have my colors correct before I deliver the files because if the colors are off, you know when someone spends thousands upon thousands of dollars for an old trunk that you know some rich tycoon owned or whatever it's ah it's important that it's they bought what they saw, so I take a picture of this first and then I go in and calibrate for that one light source, but when I want to do a general calibration for my camera, I'm going to do it for multiple light sources and I can do to at once, so I'm doing sun and shade and then you could do one for like, tungsten and uh uh led or whatever I mean, just decide what you're to r and doomed wide and varied so that then it can kind of do a approximation for the best light sources I like to do, son and an indoor two different types, so I'm gonna highlight both of these and then I'm going to go export them now the first thing that I want to do is I want to convert them to d n g on dh I don't know that you actually have to do this with the original with the ex write software, but if you're doing it inside of light room you need to do it in order to do one so we're going to do it to both anyway, so we highlight in both and I'm gonna convert them to d and g, which is in the library menu and it's convert to dmg and I'm just going to tell it go ahead and throw away the originals once it's done eso it's converting it doesn't take very long to convert to images to dmg once those two images air converted, then I'm going to I'm going to rename him because I've had there's there's a weird issue where it says there's an illegal file naming and I think it's that underscores so I'm just going to rename the photos so that it's won through two and then I'm going to go toe export dialog box and I'm going to go down to the ex right options I hear there's actually one right down here, so go to the cello color, check her passport and at the very beginning of that option so when you installed there plug in, you get this it's in there so you don't have to make this you just it is there once you install their software on dh, I'm going to name the profile so I'm just going to call this er out door mark two three uh cal uh operation there so that's the calibration I'm going to make and then I'm going to hit export and when I export it's sending them to ex rights program but it's not gonna work right now and it's not gonna work because I shot him too far away I can't see those little hash things and so it's gonna have a problem I was telling you that right now he's gonna have a problem and it's gonna take a while and it's not gonna be like what's going on if it takes this long it's probably because as a problem if I just paid more attention to focus and I have gotten closer see there's the problem couldn't be created and that's fine because all I have to do is write click those just click on one right click it there go and I'm going to show it in the finder okay, so now I have it in the finer and I will hide hide this so here's here it is I'm going to go to my programs now into the applications I'm gonna go find um color check her passport right there so I want to then open this so I've got a little window I'm gonna grab these both of these and drag them in here loading the images wait for it and once it loads the images then I have to go in and tell it where those little hash marks are. So once I once I tell it where those hash marks are then it khun figure out what supposed to be blue in what's supposed to be read and all that kind of stuff so I click on here zoom in then we go and I just go grab this little point or dealing here that thing that's its technical name is pointer dealing and I got all I do is just tell it there's a hash tag right there I'm gonna increase the size of this now maybe if I go right so um there's another one and there's another one and there's another one there see out found him now so now it knows where everything is because I told it where those hash marks come see him it was too far away and too blurry but it doesn't matter that the colors are blurry as long as it knows where the hash marks are. Now I have to go to the next one and had the zoom in on that one and do the same thing. I just have to tell it where those things are, so let me just scan over here, grab this click there there, click there and click there and now I'm in create the profile it's asking me what I want to name it it thinks I want to name it cannon us mark three but I want to name it uh out door can be less mark three hit save it's saving it out and then it's going to ask me it's going it's going to tell me it's not available toe like quit so I'm gonna quit light room right now and it's going to save out this profile and it's putting it in teo, tell me successful I can quit the program now and now I'm in a relaunch light room because it light room on lee sees things when it's opening and so profiles on lee are available to it now if I go in here you can see if I go to the develop module now this image is going to change based on if you go out of the camera calibration area right here's and by the way there's that process version see that two thousand twelve two thousand ten or two thousand three were in two thousand twelve I have adobe standard which is what's normal that's what adobe ships with that's what expects you to use? Generally I find that cameron neutral is better, but sometimes dobie standard is better on dh you can see that I've got all sorts of different these air all from visco they create some really cool film presets so they've just been busily taking pictures and changing profiles for you but if you go down to the bottom where is it outdoor cannon there it is right there outdoor cannon us five d mark three so let's zoom out and let me show you what this looks like if I go from adobe standard to camera neutral watch the colors change see how they changed I'm gonna goto portrait now they're changing so this is camera faithful now watch what happens if I go from a I'm going to go to adobe standard now watch what happens if I go to adobe the one we just made see how subtle those changes but the blues changed quite event so now if I have that profile it's available to that camera any time it won't be available to your nikon because you're nikon is not the same camera so I need to if I go to the let's see I go to our developing and I'm going to go to our image let's just go to this image right here and make sure that it was shot with the right camera yeah shot with a cannon mark three five d mark three um and so I'm going to go to the develop module and I'm going calibration and watch his colors change so now that I have that I'm going to go to outdoor mark three do you see that subtle change? Don't do it again watch closely mostly on like his lapel look at the green of that succulent there that's a subtle change. So what that tells you is that the adobe standard for my camera's pretty accurate for outdoor, maybe not as accurate for indoor, but pretty accurate for outdoor so that's pretty good, but a lot of the times you'll find that it drastically changes the way your camera operates. So it's good to know that the adobe standard is not too far off of a standard that was calibrated with a color checker. Um okay, so if you do that, if I change that and I calibrate the camera so that it's really got a good, accurate profile to it, then what I can do is I can take every image, so I'm going to reset this image too, teo what's normal, so as I bring it in, I reset this image and then I want to ask, what is it that I need to do to every single image that comes into the develop module? So what do we do? I'm I'm a brighter shooter and so I generally shoot a little I mean a darker shooter so generally need to bright and that up a little bit so I can actually take the exposure up a little bit every image so I won't go maybe more than like a third to stop brighter but I'll bring it up just a little bit I'll bring the blacks down a little bit I will bring the shadows up just a tad I'll bring the whites and the highlights down just a little bit I will take the clarity up just a little bit these are things that I constantly am doing to almost every photograph and so I would rather that the computer do this for me and then I adjust from there so I'm going teo I'm not gonna put a tone curve in there I'm not gonna put any kind of effects or lens vignettes or anything like that, but if you're someone who always gets everything put the vignette in there the thing you don't want to touch for sure is the temperature or tent can't do it because if you do that it's going to start changing all your temperatures intense to something you don't want and then you're going to come down to the camera calibration and inside the camera calibration you're going to choose your specific outdoor whatever you know whatever you've calibrated that camera or if for some reason and in our case I like the adobe cameron neutral and so I'm going to go for that that's the one I like the best overall it seems to be the best for me so that's the one I would choose the other thing that I like to do is I like to take my saturation down about negative ten because I think that I think portrait film looks better than digital, and so I prefer to have it softer colors, so and that's kind of why I bring clarity up on dh sometimes I like the contrast up, so if I take the contrast up just a little bit on that right there, my friends is my recipe for a very nice photograph all the time, and I keep having to do the same things over and over and over and over again. So rather than having to do them over and over again, the best way to do this is simply once you set that, come up to the development you quick on the developed menu and click on set the default setting. When I said it, I'm going to go over here and update the current settings to a new preset, so our new current settings so I'm updating and it's it's like one massive preset that's intelligent enough to know what camera it's looking at so you can have, like if you and I shot together, then I would have a default for your d a hundred based on the way you shoot it. And then I would have one for my mark. Three the way I shoot it. And then as we imported them together into this computer, yours would go one direction in mind would go the other, and it would change them based on the deficiencies of the way I shoot and the deficiencies of the way you shoot and then all of them would be equaled out. Now it doesn't mean that it's going to intelligently figure out that you under expose an image it's going to take most of the images and apply an appropriate setting to him. And then the ones that are off base are still off base. And we correct for those. Okay, so I'm gonna hit update current settings, and now it doesn't change all the other ones. All the other ones are still fine. Everything else is, as is the only thing it effects. Is anything coming in the gates now or anything? So if I click on, say, this image here, which is too bright wait, this might not be that's, not from my camera there there's my camera. This is assistants, camera, my camera. So if this is my camera and I hit reset, watch what happens to all these settings if you hit reset, it changes them to what is normal. So the new normal is whatever I put in and noticed that this one is off just a little bit it's, a little too dark. And so now all I need to do is increase the brightness. But the rest of it is done. So I had to change one thing to this photograph. So all images coming in are going to be neutralised for your common deficiencies and your common strengths. And now all you have to do is do a little tweaking here in there. So if you use then the process of making precepts and the process of synchronization and the process of calibration and of default settings, those three things where I guess that's four things. Those four things will make the process of working inside of light room in the developed module speed by exponentially faster than you've ever seen. It go by, because you're using all of those mechanisms to allow the computer to do most of the work for you.