My .srw Tungsten light profiles are available to try

Creating the NX SRW color profiles for 3200K Tungsten light took a bit more effort than I expected, primarily because their main use is to balance skin tones under the very orange output of studio lights. The range of skin tones is extensive and many times subjective in photography. Of course, this type of profile can be used under most incandescent light as well, though these bulbs are generally being replaced by fluorescent and LED in everyday lighting. At least creating profiles for Tungsten light is not the nightmare that trying to create profiles for fluorescent is with fluorescent's cycling properties and varied output range of light from green to purple.

There are two Single Illuminant profiles in this set, and although created specifically for the NX1 and two "S" lenses, they should also work well with any Samsung camera/lens combination as a starting point for .srw color processing. Note that as stated in my sunlight profiles thread , my new NX profiles will no longer work on .dng files and I have stopped development of DNG profiles.

Rather then post a profile RGB/CMYK color analysis chart for these profiles as I did for the sunlight profiles in that thread, this time I am including a visual representation of their effect:

On the left is the typical camera rendition of tungsten light with its very orange glow. This is the untouched JPEG from my NX1 with 50-150mm f/2.8 S in raw+JPEG. The center is the .srw file opened up in Adobe ACR with the Adobe Standard profile applied. As seen, the results are a very unnatural pink in color. Opening up the .srw file in LightRoom with the Adobe Standard profile produced the same pink effect. The image on the right is the result of applying my new profile in place of the Adobe Standard. Here the model's skin color, although still not perfect, is very close to real life. This is actually version 3.2 of my Tungsten profiles created over the last couple of weeks, more fine tuned each time from the prior version.

Now keep in mind that properly evaluating the above image is totally dependent on your viewing equipment. Just like there are "rules" on what equipment to use when creating profiles, there are "rules" in evaluating them. The very first and most important rule is that your monitor must be calibrated. If your viewing device is not producing color correctly, you can not see the results correctly. The second "rule" is that creation and evaluation should never be done in very bright or very dark ambient light conditions (unless you have a high end set-up that varies the nits output of the monitor to compensate for the ambient light). Color evaluations should generally only be done at a medium to low ambient light level (and never when the ambient light is fluorescent). And third, using an IPS monitor is always better than using a TN monitor.

So if you do raw shooting with your NX camera in tungsten light, you are welcome to try my new profiles. The drill should be getting familiar. Send me a request through the Contact page of my website (link below in my signature) and I will return the profiles by e-mail. Many of you are already using my SRW Sunlight profiles and I appreciate the response and comments. I will try to create an automatic distribution list for you in the future, but in the meantime, please send a second request for the Tungsten SRW profiles if you want to try them.

Your comments and questions are welcome.

Ed