Industrial Retouch and Color

RAW presets are helpful little buddies ...

Update: I have added Lightroom presets (.lrtemplate) and ACR presets (.xmp) for the Nikon D700 and D3X. The downloads are at the bottom of this blog entry.

Update: I have added Lightroom presets for Canon 5D, 5DMKII, XSi, Nikon D3, D300

Dry version for the more technical: (scroll past this paragraph if your sleepy or hungover)
If you have ever worked with lots of RAW files under tight deadlines you know how important it is to have a streamlined workflow. Repetitious tasks must be identified and engineered into quick and fast solutions. If not, your going to be up for a laborious all-nighter, and that cuts into late night fun time. Whatever your late night fun time may be ... Recently with the release of Photoshop CS4 (also an earlier beta DNG version) Adobe has finally created a bit of parity between manufacturers in-camera photo settings and ACR's Camera Calibration-Profiles Tab. What does this mean for you? Less grief and head scratching, and more time at the beach. Rewind back to CS3 and before. Unless you did some complicated ACR camera calibrations with Macbeth target measurement and validations, your camera JPEG files never matched your RAW files when imported into ACR for processing. Also, you might have struggled to properly color correct files because of gamut shifts in certain color hues. (Saturated reds and greens) Now Adobe has kindly done their homework and provided us consumers with pre-canned discrete camera profiles.

Short and sweet version:
I have created some camera preset profiles for, at this point and time, three current and popular camera models. The Canon 5D Mark II, Nikon D3, and the Nikon D300. You will find the downloads for each of these below.

Install:
Download and decompress the .zip file. You will see the current presets Adobe is offering per each camera model. These presets have naming parity with the in-camera picture styles. Loading these files is easy. There are a few ways to load these into Photoshop CS4. The easiest is to go to the Camera Calibration tab in ACR and click on the little triangular arrow, select load. Navigate to the decompressed .zip file and select load. Now you should see the loaded presets in the ACR Settings tab (which is right next to the Camera Calibration tab. You can also load these presets into the latest version of Lightroom. My file cataloger of choice.)

Side Note!
These presets incorporate Adobes default ACR settings, except when choosing a camera calibration other than "Adobe Standard". And one other thing ... I have changed two other parameters. Under the sharpness tab you will see that the default radius of 1 had been changed to .5, I have also disabled any "Color Noise Reduction". I personally do not want ACR smearing any chroma details. Unless I have completely underexposed the shot or the ISO is just nasty high, I prefer to keep every bit of color nuance as possible. As my ole man use to say "Do what you want, you will anyway", lol.


Finally, here are some slightly posterized animated .gif examples visually displaying the differences for your viewing pleasure.

Closing:
I hope you find these presets helpful. Anyone can make these, the hard part is finding the time. If your like me, usually your in a hurry and process files from the seat of your pants. I try to slow myself down and hone my workflows for better asset management and processing. You will also find these presets handy for importing a large volume of files into Lightroom. Having the ability to quickly apply a preset on import to many files for fast previewing and cataloging is invaluable. Be the ball Danny ...

ACR-Photoshop/Bridge Presets (.xmp)
Download the Canon 5DMarkII Presets
Download the Nikon D3 Presets
Download the Nikon D300 Presets
New Download the Nikon D700 Presets
New Download the Nikon D3X Presets

Lightroom Presets (.lrtemplate)
Download the Lightroom Presets (5D,5DMKII,XSi,D300,D3)
New Download the Nikon D700 Lightroom Presets
New Download the Nikon D3X Lightroom Presets

Reference Tags: Color, Retouching, Sharpening, Premedia, Color Manipulation, Prepress, Photography, Asset Management Software, Catalog Production Services, RAW File Workflows, Digital Image, DAM, RAW, Preset, Presets, ACR, Photoshop, CS, Nikon, Canon