From the Adobe Camera Raw User to User Forum
From the Adobe hosted Camera Raw User to User Forum comes an interesting thread regarding why the author of Camera Raw chooses not to use custom profiles for digital cameras.
The original post, raw 3.1 professional custom profiles for highend digital cameras contains a variety of responses–most notably by Bruce Fraser, author of Real World Camera Raw in Adobe Photoshop CS2.
In one particular post (#11), Bruce sums up the answer by saying;
There’s a fundamental mismatch between ICC profiling technology and digital capture. ICC colorimetry is output-referred. We need scene-referred colorimetry. The Camera Raw solution to this fundamental issue is, in my view, brilliant. For each supported camera, Camera Raw contains two matrix RGB profiles, one built under Illuminant A, the other under D65. (The profiles were built by Thomas Knoll using his own proprietary profiling tools, which I suspect are better than anything on the market if the CMYK profiles bundled with Photoshop are any indication.) The white balance controls interpolate between (and extrapolate beyond) these two profiles.
The two huge benefits of this approach are
1.) It works under all lighting conditions, which a single ICC profile does not.
2.) It preserves accurate relative hue and saturation while allowing me to impose my own tonality, which is a great deal more useful to most photographers than a single LUT-based profile that compresses the scene dynamic range into the output dynamic range the same way for all images, whether of a polar bear in the snow or a black cat in a coal cellar.
There are many raw converters that allow you to use a custom camera profile built by ProfileMaker or its competitors. If that’s really what you want, I suggest you use one of those. But this is an approach that would cripple Camera Raw, and I would argue strenuously against it. I doubt that Thomas would go for it anyway, for all the aforementioned reasons.
Read the entire thread
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