Recently we had the brilliant Katrin Eismann as our guest speaker at the 
New York City Lightroom Meetup. Katrin is the chair of the Digital Masters Program at the School of Visual Arts and has written dozens of books on photography. Clever, smart and funny, she’s truly one of the best educators I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting.
Katrin’s opinion (and I agree!) is there’s no right or wrong way to develop your photos in Lightroom. In fact she frequently makes numerous variations of an image just to play out her options. And in this video I share one of her tips: starting with the Lightroom Camera Calibration panel and creating presets from the profiles to make previewing them easier.
Here’s some background why we would want to use the Calibration profiles. Your camera has picture style settings like Landscape, Portrait, Vivid, etc. but only applies them to JPEGs. And although that setting may there in a camera raw photo when using the manufacturer’s software, Lightroom doesn’t see them. This is just the way camera raw works with Lightroom. What if you’re shooting raw and JPEG? Then only the JPEG will reflect those picture style settings. Which begs this question: what if you like the picture styles on the JPEGs that come out of your camera? The answer is: Camera Calibration Profiles.
Confused? Watch the video below and this will all become clear.
Really! Honest! It will… (Lazy? Don’t want to do all the hard work? Then get my free set Camera Calibration presets for Canon, Fuji, Nikon, Olympus and Sony, just sign up for my quarterly newsletter.)
Lightroom emulates your camera’s JPEG settings and applies them non-destructively to your camera raw file.
Keep in mind you can only do this with camera raw files! It doesn’t work with other formats like JPEGs, PSDs, etc. With these types of files you’ll only see “Embedded” in the Profiles pulldown menu.
Hi I have subscribed, where do I get the presets offered?
After you reply to the email to confirm your email address, you will be sent a new email with a link to download the Calibration Presets and installation instructions.
Thank you for the Calibration Preset files. I installed them and restarted LR, and they are now in my preset module, however they don’t seem to have any effect on my raw photos. I was thinking the preset would be a copy of the color settings produced by each of the cameras profiles from which it was produced, and therefore have an effect on any raw file from any camera. Is that my mistake in understanding how the presets work, or is there something wrong with the presets I installed or how I installed them?
Hello, I’ve heard from a few followers lately that my calibration presets have been hit or miss. The Calibration presets from all the other manufacturers used to work here (Current version of Lightroom is 2015.10.1). If you hover over a calibration preset and watch the PREVIEW window you will see changes (we do here on Mac Tower, MacBook Pro and Mac Mini), but for some reason these days, they are not always applied to the RAW image. The Canon, Nikon (I use Nikon), Olympus and Sony presets still work here. What doesn’t work is the Fuji color presets, but monochrome… Read more »
Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately they don’t even show up in the PREVIEW window when I hover over the presets on my MacBook Pro. I will un-install and then re-install to see if that makes a difference.