Excellent!  Just tried out the new Camera profiles on a couple of my more problematic D700 files, and the color posterization I used to see seems to be gone.  Thanks for making these new beta profiles available.  Good work!

It is definitely an  improvement, the question is whether the profile is still good enough,  there is still room for improvement, but definitely a step in the right  direction.

Wbr.

Per

Hi Eric,

Thanks for those profiles! My comments :

- Posterization is gone! That is great.

- Colors are pretty much like the one you get from Capture NX and more accurate than previous profile (at least they seem to)

- The previous tone curve was closer to the CNX one than the v2 beta profiles. This one is closer with highlights (except the clipping point) but not mid tones that are brighter.

- Highlights are still clipping 0.5EV earlier than CNX, giving too often burnt highlights (BaselineExposure).

Regards,

Romain

Just downloaded the v2 D3/D700 profiles.  This now give a much better match to the native camera picture controls as rendered with Capture NX.  Now I have consistency of images in my workflow from camera to lightroom without having to go via NX.

V. 1 gave much too flat colors, especially a brightly sunlit yellow house facade was washed out, but now is very close to NX.  In addition, NX skin tones were warmer, and contrast not as agressive as V1.  V2 seems to have gotten so close now, that for it is in the range of very acceptable.

Also, the de-mosaic of D700 raw fines with fine density leaves, foliage seems to be improved compared to NX.  Nikon D700 always had a tendency to render this type of scenes mushy compared to Canon 5D (just look at Ken Rockwells examples), and I have also experienced the same.  Seems like the new lightroom engine has improved on this.  Also, the sharpening seems to be improved by being able to apply much more sharpening without objectionable artifacts creeping in as soon.  It would be nice to know if I am just hallucinating, or if the developers really have worked on this;-)

For the profiles to match I have to turn off Active D-lighting, a feature which reduces dynamic range in a very fine manner with the D700.

In addition the D-lighting (fine) is NX does a better job than what I can figure out in Lightroom, so this is an area of technology that Adobe should work on (or I need to figure out how to do it better using Lightroom).  As far as I can see, Fill lighting is nowhere near as good, but highlight recover is Lightroom appears better.  I suspects Lightroom "cheats" by extrapolating values from clipped channels, while NX refuses to guess at what non-capture values might be.   (again, I would welcome if the LR developers could comment on this conjecture ;-)

Finally, the U point editing in NX in really brilliant and in addition ViewNX is much faster at previewing and zooming on NEF files.

And one more "final", what about the automatic chromatic abberation correction done by NX, would be nice if LR could do it so I don't have to worry about it.

Although I have not yet gotten to a single software package for post-processing, LR3 will probably reduce my dependency on NX, but not VIEW NX.

Sorry about these last off-subject comments, I know this is a camera profile forum...., but mimicing the Picture controls is a big step forward.

Carsten

Hi, overall tonality/contrast rendition are improved.

Reds specifically crimsons and to lesser extent orange are still not rendering true natural colours compared to custom calibrated profiles from a colour chart.

D700 - LR2

Thanks, Rudi

Just tried the new D700 profiles, great improvement, far less posterization and strange blocked out dark when using the D2x modes. Keep up the great work, all looks promising!

Is this just for the D3 or also for the D3s?

It would be helpful to have a confirmation that the D3s profiles are already "optimized". Thanks!

Jeff

In the windows explorer, under the folder options > view: make sure you have "show hidden files, folders and drives" checked.

Eric,

Thank you so much for taking action on this! It must be a daunting task to maintain, update and add to the camera profile list and therefore we all do appreciate your work!

Another profile that caught my eye since quite some time is the Canon 5D Mark II Standard profile. In contrary to the camera's behavior (or that of DPP) this profile renders images in warm light and with low exposure not very well. Especially with skin tones this shows up negatively.

Thanks for listening!

Thomas

Eric, any plans to produce these for the D3X?  Thanks.

Confused as to which are the latest versions of these profiles.  Are the profiles listed as the download "v.2 beta" updated profile with files dated March 10, 2010 intended to supercede the profiles included in the Camera Raw update 5.7 with file dates of April 7, 2010,  are they the same as those with the most recent Raw update, or what?

When are these going "Gold"? (shipping)

Carsten

Would it be possible to get an updated profile for a D300 as good quality as these?

Not a dumb question.

In the LR3 Develop Module, scroll down to Camera Calibration.  The second setting down is Profile and it is a dropdown list from which you can choose which profile you want to use.

The question I have is which of the profiles is the most recent?  For example, I show Camera Portrait, Camera Portrait beta 1 and Camera Portrait v2 (for the Nikon D3).  It's the same assortment of choices for Landscape, Natural, Standard and Vivid.  Am I correct that v2 is the most recent version of each set of profiles?

John

Thanks, Eric.  Your quick reply and the great profiles are much appreciated.

John

You're using JPEGs.

Ah, sorry. I had the NEF and the JPEG next to each other and picked the wrong one.

Thanks again.

D.

Any word on when these will be out of beta?  Will they be replacing the D3 and D700 profiles that are currently included in the Camera Raw 6.2 and LR 3.2 releases or are they going to be added as permanent alternate profiles alongside the current "V1" versions?

I tried searching Adobe Labs for updated information and can't even find any references to the beta profiles ... is there any place to keep tabs on their status?  It's been a long time since the betas came out.

SJH

I'm also wondering if there any sort of ETA on the final versions of these profiles; it's basically been a half year since the V2 beta. Seems like sort of an indefinite project right now?

There were many posts about this in the past. So I took a look into Adobe's profiles for D700 (original and beta v2). I have some experience with this, because I made my own program for making dng profiles for some Canon cameras, that are not supported by Adobe. I noticed several things:

First, in the lookup table of both versions of the profile, values for Value segment 0 (= total black) are a simple copy of segment 1 (=dark midtones). My opinion is that this approach is a bit oversimplified, resulting with big differences in dark tones between ACR and NX (oversaturated blue and orange/brown on your picture). Midtones and highlights are much better

Obviously, points for total black can't be calibrated at all. What I did in my program was that I made calibration on very dark tones, and did some recalculation to aproximatelly match camera jpegs. It's not possible to get total match, but I came much closer

Second, there is a difference in tone curve between original D700 profile and beta v2. Tone curve in the original profile has a "notch" in the lowest part, caused by the fact that blacks slider default value should be 5 (according to Adobe). On the beta v2 profile, bottom part of the tone curve is smooth and looks similar to what I got on my profiles with blacks slider set to 0. So I suppose that for this profile (and some other latest profiles), blacks should be set to 0.

It would be nice to get some comment about this from Eric or Jeff

I attached a printscreen from my program that can display a lookup table in the profile, and this is how Hue segment 0 (= red) looks like.

On the left pane, there are value and saturation remapping points (in Photo Pro color space), and on the right, there are hue shifts

Also, there is a tone curve on the left pane (displayed in 3 different scales)