Does Sony Own Or Pay Adobe??

Batdude wrote:

Boy oh boy. Man where do I start. I have heard that many many times through out the years but man I have to disagree with that. At least that has not been my experience. This topic can also get complicated and all technical (which I'm not) and it wouldn't be the first time.

I have shot with different cameras and tried different software and yes with great effort and time you can get one photo to look like another brand's output, but, never exactly. You can get close, but not exactly.

From what I (personally) have experienced, a RAW file is like a RAW piece of Rib Eye steak. You can get a piece of RAW steak from three different stores and yes it is RAW so you can make it any way you want, but each piece of RAW steak comes from different cows so the tenderness and flavor will NOT necessarily be the same. Something will be different.

But from what many here and other parts of this planet have seen, each RAW converter software interprets and responds very differently to color tones and stuff. That is a fact which is one of the reasons why many don't like and use LR but C1 or something else.

I could be totally wrong but what I'm seeing is that LR doesn't keep up, fine tune or optimizes it's RAW converter for many of the cameras out there. Like I said before, so far the images that I'm processing with the older cameras I'm using look okay, but many of the newer models, including Fuji don't look so good and I know for a fact that these cameras are much more capable of beautiful images and up to a point, with very little PP.

Why do I say that? Because I'm comparing several photos with LR and Luminar which I have as well and Lightroom's profiles are making color output out of wack. This complaint has been going on for quite a long time and for some reason I'm starting to notice it more. The main reason why I use LR is because it's workflow simply works for me but I'm starting to see that maybe LR is the actual problem.

No, you're wrong on this. Adobe's standard X-Trans demosaicing is still subpar (there are ways around that), but otherwise Lightroom is still an excellent and very capable editor. If you aren't happy with the color of your images, a custom profile will often do the trick and can be made to very closely match the basic color and contrast properties of different RAW file/profile combos from most modern cameras (if that's what you're after).

I had to edit a project that was shot RAW with both Fuji X-T2 and a Sony A7III cameras and I was surprised to find that even using the Adobe Color profile which was available for both cameras (and should have matched relatively closely), that the color was significantly different - The Fuji files looked "OK", but the Sony files had a most unpleasant yellow/green hue about them (which I later discovered was common for many Sony Lightroom profiles from many Sony models). Anyway, I decided to just use my default custom Fuji profile which I have found to be consistently more true to life than either the Adobe Color or Fuji Provia profiles (which would be my next choices), and I would try to make a custom profile for the Sony to match. I did, it did, and it was relatively easy to do using these same DPR test images. The files still edited a bit differently with different WBs and lots of pulling and pushing of tones (it was in very low light), but the quality and look of the resulting images was indistinguishable.

Here's the DPReview Fuji X-H1 test image next to the Sony A7 III with those profiles automatically applied. Are they exactly the same? No, but they are very, very close (Note: these are at default import settings, no additional editing whatsoever).

That custom Sony profile is now part of the custom default import settings for the A7III, when I import and open an A7 iII Raw in Lightroom it looks just like my Fuji images with the matching profile. I don't know why anyone would want to make their Fuji files look like the less than stellar Sony Lightroom profiles, but I'm sure it could be done. Most people seem to prefer their Sony RAW files look like more like Fuji or Canon files do in Lightroom.

The current version of Lightroom, along with Adobe Camera RAW (which is included with, and is mostly identical to LR, but has some unique functionality), you can create custom profiles from your own custom presets. Unlike presets, profiles operate independently of the development sliders - If you apply a custom profile, you will get the desired changes without any of the sliders moving. If you apply a custom profile at import, all the settings will start at zero, far more powerful and user friendly than presets.

You can also modify existing profiles to suit your needs and save them as new profiles - For example how about Astia skin tones, but without the yellowy greens and overblown blues. Good stuff.

Besides the simple Lightroom/ACR method, more sophisticated profiles can be created using the x-rite color checker software and various other 3rd party options too. If your color just sucks no matter what you do, try googling Custom Profiles and LUTs for Lightroom before moving to some other software that will likely have issues of its own.