I was showing my son the fine art of flower photography today, mainly because we had a fresh planter of tulips on the kitchen table. I pulled out the Westcott diffusion panel and placed it in front of the kitchen window to give a nice background and to diffuse the southern light coming into the kitchen. It was a little overcast so the light was already pretty soft. I proceeded to show him how to use the macro mode on his point and shoot Nikon. We put the camera on a tripod, composed our shot, and used the self-timer to eliminate any camera shake. We both had a lot of fun but he grew bored of this more quickly than I. Since everything was already set up, I grabbed my D80, put on a zoom lens, and screwed the close-up filter on the front. I shot from a few different angles and even brought my black background up so I could change the backdrop from white to black (do you see what my family has to put up with).
So that’s the back story, here’s where it gets fun. I plopped down on my couch and grabbed my notebook computer and began the process of downloading my images with Lightroom. As they started to appear, one-by-one in the strip, I moved over to the Develop module so I could start making adjustments. As I began making adjustment, I cursed the one key weakness that I see in all Nikon dSLR cameras, they over-saturate the reds. Then I remembered the Camera Calibration profiles that were included as part of the Lightroom 2.2 update (they live in the bottom-right panel of the Develop Module).
The default view was ACR 4.4 which meant that I had made some adjustments in Lightroom prior to opening the Calibration panel. I then began to click on all the profiles to see if there would be any difference in my image. All I can say is WOW! I could not believe that there was this much visible shift between the profiles. Since this was shot in RAW on a Nikon, I had all of the default D2X profiles, along with the other various profiles (see image above). I decided to do a little test and put the results here so you could see what I saw. Now, you have to know that this was just a single image with a very limited pallet and some profiles work differently with different colors, but it is still interesting to see how many version I got of the same shot, all before doing any correcting in Lightroom (I set the image back to it’s original import settings by clicking the Reset button).
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- Adobe Camera Raw 4.4
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- Adobe Standard
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- Nikon D2X Mode 1
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- Nikon D2X Mode 2
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- Nikon D2X Mode 3
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- Camera Neutral
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- Camera Standard
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- Camera Vivid
As you can see, there is a wide range of possibilities lurking within these often overlooked profiles. Here’s a final example of an image that really shows of the Camera Landscape profile. I skipped it in the tulip shots because it really does work best with landscape images. So check out these two comparison images in the post below, and if you haven’t updated to version 2.2 on your Lightroom, well what are you waiting for?
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Steve Kalman 
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Jeff Revell discusses new camera profiles in latest update to Lightroom2: http://is.gd/jNSt LM