Third-party RAW conversion and preserving your in-camera settings

Over the last ten years I’ve seen a lot of discussions about the advantages of shooting RAW over JPEGs. While I have been a dedicated RAW shooter for about five years now, I have to admit that I started out shooting JPEGs.

Why? Quite simply, the cameras I had access to when I made the switch to digital – the Nikon D1 and Canon EOS D30 – were not practical platforms for shooting RAW on news and sports jobs.

Advances in camera shooting rates, burst depth and camera-to-card write speed changed all of that, and I found myself making the changeover to RAW after upgrading to the Nikon D1h. Loaded with a modest-performing Lexar 80x CF card, I could capture 27 images at five frames-per-second and have the buffer cleared out and ready for another action sequence in about the same amount of time it took to put a new roll into an F3. It was almost like shooting film again.

Fast forward to 2010. Most of today’s modern professional cameras have far surpassed the speed and capacity of my D1h and film cameras. Nikon’s current flagship – the D3x – matches the performance of the D1h while capturing images at nearly 10x the resolution.

Amateurs also benefited from the advances made in camera design. Once only found on cameras aimed at professionals and advanced amateurs, RAW found its way into $500 entry-level digital SLRs and high-end point-and-shoot cameras.

This necessitated the need for better conversion tools. The camera manufacturers and many third-party software companies responded by producing a plethora of programs capable of performing conversions. Microsoft and Apple even added RAW support to their operating systems.

Unfortunately, as some of us have discovered, not all RAW converters are created equal. Some users have reported that the quality of conversions vary greatly in quality from program to program. Some applications have more capabilities than others. Some offer limited camera support. Due to these differences, each program renders images differently.

One of the most obvious of these conversion differences is the ability to include all of the in-camera settings when the files are processed.

For the purposes of this article, I have converted two D2x images using Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop CS3 and Capture NX2. No adjustments or crops have been made to the files. While these pictures came from a Nikon camera, the differences between conversions would also be apparent with RAW files from other camera manufacturers.

On the left is a D2x file conversion made with the default settings in Adobe Camera Raw version 4.6. This version is available as an update to Photoshop CS3. At right is a conversion made with Nikon Capture NX2 v2.2.4. The image was shot using the color mode I setting, which Nikon says is optimized for skin tones. You’ll notice that the skin tones have taken on a yellow tint in the ACR conversion. The blue color of the uniform is also different. In comparison, the Capture NX2 version has much more pleasing skin tones that were produced without any adjustment. Please click on the image to see a larger version.

The differences are subtle, but become more apparent if your camera has the ability to capture RAW and JPEG simultaneously.

The image shown at the left is a JPEG. On the right is the corresponding RAW image as converted using the default settings in ACR 4.6. These two images should be identical. While the colors of the television remote are the same, you'll notice that the blue of the flex fill cover and the black cardboard background are very different.

By default, ACR v4.6 uses a setting called ACR 4.4 located in the camera profile tab, shown above.

Nikon refers to these in-camera settings as Picture Control settings. In Capture NX2 they can be found in the Camera Settings menu in the Edit List. These options are not available in ACR.

Now it’s not that Adobe Camera Raw is a poor converter. It actually makes beautiful conversions. In fact, ACR has a few useful features that Capture NX2 lacks.

By default, ACR kept the white balance. It just didn’t keep any of my other in-camera settings like contrast and saturation.

Sure, it’s possible to make adjustments to the image to compensate for these differences, but this can be time consuming and the adjustments required may vary from image-to-image. If you’re like me, you want to spend as little time in front of the computer as possible.

So is it necessary to use the camera manufacturer software to maintain the look you intended?

Thankfully, the answer is NO.

Adobe and a few other third-party software manufacturers have been able to decode these camera settings into what are called camera profiles.

The conversion on the left was made with a beta version of the D2x camera profile that I added to Adobe Camera Raw. The conversion is nearly identical to the conversion made with Capture NX2, which is shown again on the right.

Adobe has released a beta camera profile add-in for Photoshop CS3 that can be found here.

A partial list of cameras supported by the beta can be found here.

Once installed, you can access the new profiles in the camera profile tab:

In the screenshot above, I have applied the D2x profile for color mode I.

This add-on can only be used with version 4.5 or 4.6 of ACR. If you are using Photoshop CS3 and need to update ACR, you can do so by going to the Adobe update site. Updates for ACR v5 which is designed for Photoshop CS4 and Lightroom v2 can also be found there.

I have not had the opportunity to use Photoshop CS4 or Lightroom v2, but my understanding is that profiles for many of today’s dSLRs are included with the new version of ACR and are accessed in the same manner.

Adobe has also created a profile editor so that you can create your own profiles. It can be downloaded from this page.

The profile editor can also be used with the DNG converter to convert your RAW files to the Adobe DNG format. The use of a color checker chart such as the industry standard GretagMacbeth ColorChecker chart is required to create your own custom profiles.