Lessons

Lesson Info

Calibrations and Custom Profiles in Lightroom CC

So we are coming back we just talked about setting up your camera and taking a bunch of j pegs plus raws so that you can calibrate and uh the raw images air important for the camera calibration j pegs aren't important for that but then the j pegs are going to be important for what we do after that to calibrate light room so we talked about the color check her passport this is important it allows us to have specific colors that we know the values for s o that we can assess the values light room can see those values the plug in for light room from x right can read those values and then create a custom profile for your camera so you're getting the right color every time so this is really important and it is not a very expensive tool toe own and it fits in your pocket so you can take it anywhere I just have it in one of the pockets on my camera bag and then as soon as I start shooting I just throw it in my coat pocket or I throw it in my assistance bag or whatever, whoever so it's always h...

onest and we could pull it out taking picture put it up okay, so this is really important it doesn't by the way become important for every single photo I take at a wedding because how ridiculous would that be so I don't wantto I don't want to call attention to myself during a wedding by holding this up but but when I'm doing a portrait or when I'm doing a um I'll tell you a story I shot a wedding a really nice hotel but the hotel it was built by frank lloyd wright um it's called the biltmore and at the biltmore there's one room that has a gold ceiling so if you bounce off it gold comes back it's literally gold and so the gold comes back down on dh then the walls are not white there like some brownish grayish stone and then there's curtains all up so it's like this dark horrible hole of a room it's beautiful when you're in it but photographing horrible um but then they had a cake and then whatever ya who was doing the light design did a red light coming down on the cake red like pure on red light like a dark room red light or something like frank and I went up to that cake and I looked at it and I couldn't tell what color it was I couldn't tell if it was white if it was blue if it was yellow no idea I tried I was like blocking it I was trying to like there's no way I could see what color it was take a picture of this right next to the cake then take a picture of the cake I only knew it was a yellow cake when I looked at it in my computer the next day was the on ly point, which I knew what color that cake was so he's gonna be very useful that time in the imagine I just had no reference point I could've made it a blue cake and I would have thought it was fine, you know? But it is a yellow cake, so if you happen to have any color blind issues or whatever this this will be useful um, so and we're all color blind to some degree, so you really have to have something solid to, you know, to be able to tell your client yes, my color is right. You need scientific cold hard fact to tell you that so x right creates this color checker pro, which allows a color check her passport, which allows youto calibrate your camera and then they make a calibrate er to calibrate your screen and I have that right here. So before we went live yesterday, I calibrated my screen, so I know whatever I'm doing is dead on accurate. Now, I haven't calibrated that screen, and I haven't calibrated the screens at home, so I don't know what you're seeing, but I know that what I'm producing is perfect dead on accurate because I've calibrated everything from the camera tow the screen all the way through the print so I know that what I'm producing is accurate and my clients may have a different experience on their screen, but I can tell them well, you just need to have someone professionally calibrate your screen and if you'd like, I can come and do that for you for a feat so you know, there's there's that okay? So let's calibrate so the first thing that we need do then is we need to calibrate this camera so that light room knows what color my cameras seeing and is able to then reproduce what I saw at the camera or what the camera was seeing in its chip. So the first thing we're gonna do is we're going to go to one of these color checker passport shots. All I have to do is have my assistant or my model hold the shot, make sure when you're doing this because remember we just shot j pegs plus raws make sure you're doing it on the broad image, not on the j peg because I could cycle over to this one and it's the j peg I don't want to do it on the j peg we want to do it on the raw image, okay? So I know that I have these colors I know exactly what those colors are and so I want to create a profile the profile is going to end up being down here in the camera calibration area and light room is interesting this way when you're in the developed module you can see that you've got like basic tone curve split tones as you go down it's so it's basic up here and it gets more and more detailed and less and less likely that you'll use it all the way down to the bottom so it's like general too specific that's the way they've designed it so you started top and move down you should very rarely have to go to the camera calibration that's something that generally speaking you should only be using in order to set up your camera calibrations set up the way you're going to run color and then after that you should probably be able to leave it alone if you don't get to leave it alone I guarantee the best way to deal with it is through presets and we're going to talk about those in the next segment but when you create a calibration make a preset for that calibration so that you can quickly access that rather than having to come down here and click on it all right so in our camera calibration you can see that I've got three process versions two thousand three ten and twelve if you're in two thousand three that's the math that they were using back in light room one and two two thousand ten is the math they were using in light from three I believe these air correct I might be off by a version or two but two thousand three I mean two thousand ten is definitely light room three and then once we hit light room foreign five we went to two thousand twelve very different math so the algorithms are different so just make sure that you're in the proper process version for what you want if I click on two thousand ten by the way so let's let's go up to the basic area do you see how this says exposure? Contrast highlights shadows whites, blacks but if we go down to camera calibration and we turned this to two thousand ten and then go back up now it says exposure recovery fill light blacks it turned into light room three so if someone is really in love with the sliders and the math and the way light room three produced images, all they have to do is they can still be by light room c c they get all the bells and whistles that come with it, they get all the cool stuff they get the connection of the cloud, but they can turn their develop module back in time two, two thousand ten if they want to do that but that also means that they have to wear really bright uh like neon clothing at the same time and they have to like do pony tails and stuff like that and then high bangs because if you like living in the past you should also wear eighties clothing while you're working in light room three so just a little jab it those of you who are still on light room three we literally are on light room six now so let's get with the times there's so much in light room c c u cannot not have it so all right camera calibration so we're going to go to two thousand twelve once you're in your process version below that is a profile this is what light room ships with adobe standard camera faithful so do these look familiar these air the picture styles so if I choose the cannon landscape picture style here it will look a little more similar to the canon picture style here called landscapes so I'm going to I'll show you the difference here so if I click on landscape which is going to be totally not right like click on it you can see how oversaturated the colors look the oranges air really oversaturated that's landscape don't want landscape usually camera portrait is also a little ugly I don't know one but camera faithful or camera standard or cameron neutral arm or like what you would see in your camera so I usually do camera neutral which just gives me very basic no frills that's the way it looks s o I stay in camera neutral or camera or adobe standard, the two of those air generally correct unless I calibrate and we don't have any calibrations in here yet, but we're gonna make one right now. So the way we do this and by the way, these other little controls down here are so that you can tweak whatever count calibration you create. So first, create calibration on, then tweak. So if you always find that your images or to read or the shadows there to green or whatever, this is where you would tweak that, just tweak it until it looks about right, but if you're going to tweak a calibration and then you're going to use it on everything, make sure that whatever you're calibrating with is a fairly standard image, so if you shoot portrait ce, don't go use a landscape to calibrate your system, use the portrait, right? So here we go. I'm going to take this image, so make sure that I'm on the raw image, so I am on a c r to and I'm going to go up to the export dialog box so file uh, export or I could come down to if I'm in the library module, I can go to this little button right here, export and when I export, I'm going to go up to this export to and instead of going to the hard drive I'm going to go to an ex right preset now that's on ly there if you install the system so once you buy a color check her pro are passport I always want to say probe color check her passport it comes with a disc now I don't know what you do with the disc because I don't own a disk reader anywhere my new homeowners association sent me a disk of all the cc and r's can't read him don't know what they are because its on a disk so anyway uh it comes with a disc but you can also download this plug in from their website so I download the plug in I plug it into light room through the plug and manager and it shows up in the export dialog box so once you are on that presets then here here's what you get to choose the first thing is you need to name your profile so I'm going to call this studio light pro photo. So now I know that any time in the studio with pro photo lighting this is going to work because the pro photo lights are always the same they maintained very, very accurate color, so I'm going to be perfect with this all right, so and then by the way, you can also do too, so we're just doing one image. But if you were to select two images like let's say you did a pairing of two images one in shadow and one in son highlight both of them and then run this thing and it will take both of them and merge them and make a profile that's accurate to both shadow and son, so it'll give you kind of a more general usage profile if you put two in instead of just one. Okay, so I'm just doing one, but you can actually do too. All right, so the first thing I do is name it. And then after that everything else is just kind of informational there's nothing else that needs to really be done here and I'm going to export so it's exporting the profile and it's going to give me a message once it's done so right now what it's doing is zooming into this thing and it's looking for squares because it knows what the squares look like it's looking at him it's reading him and then once it finds all the squares it calculates out okay, that red is to read or that blue is not blue enough and there we go so the profile has been generated, but in order for it to be useful to me it's not gonna be there until I quit light room so that's a quick light room and then I have to restart light room once is restarted and this is the true with all preset sa's well, so if you get presets in you install presets they're not live until you restart light room otherwise they're just not there because light room checks for all profiles and presets on start up. All right, go into the develop module again and inside the develop module we now have one extra profile which is studio light pro photo so now if I click that so watch the difference between adobe standard and cameron neutral see that? See that difference? Go dobie standard now watch the difference between that and studio light pro photo whoa! Well, you can definitely see that it did something I'm just saying you could definitely see I think maybe it got fooled by the green want want want that's funny usually doesn't work that way I probably did not get close enough to it so let's let's do that one instead how's that well lessons learned right? Just get closer to it so that it's it it probably couldn't at that distance it probably didn't find the right squares and then it picked up some of this green but you can definitely see that it did a major thing to the images right so if you want purple images make sure that you run it farther away so all right so let's try this again let's run the profile again let's go export should we name this uh studio light thing pro photo good let's hope right so I'm a hit export ok so it's created that profile and now let's restart so absolutes is there photo is still sinking with light mobile yes guy so apparently I've been working on this image and remember these air synchronizing with lighter mobile and so it was synchronizing with lighter mobile so I was like do you want me to quit because I'm in the process of putting something on life or mobile so start back up now we're gonna have two profiles in there and hopefully this other one worked if it doesn't then I'm just going to say something weird's going on and uh we'll have to investigate uh let's see okay so we go here and let's use the good one there we go so I just wasn't close enough it didn't it was like uh you know I can't see so get close enough um that's a good lesson always get close otherwise you get you get that so s o this is the correct colors and you can see watch watch these colors change it's pretty impressive actually if you goto dobie standard you see that red and that green watch the red and green change so they got more red mohr green more yellow so now we've got a really accurate color. Okay, so that's our first calibration yeah, what about the skin tone would that could that be possibly throw it off to maybe yeah, any colors that I was showing if that's far enough away and it can't find the right boxes and, like accurately figure out the boxes then it started might start throw other colors in there so the best would be to really get close to them yeah, if you could totally get like right up to it, that would be the best but sometimes if you got the wrong lens on like I was shooting with a wider lens, so if I got him close I might shadow that thing, but if I was using a long lens I could get in and get it get it so yeah, the closer you get, the better off you are. Okay, so now that I have that as part of my calibration, I could then come in and say, but I typically find that I want that my red should be a little bit less saturated because I'm always finding that skin tones or to read on my camera or whatever, so go ahead and just those things once you've adjusted those things now you have a camera calibration shut that down, leave the camera calibration weigh this