Does Sony Own Or Pay Adobe??

Batdude wrote:

Is there some kind of conspiracy going here?

Yes...they're all out to get you.

Erik Baumgartner wrote:

CAcreeks wrote:

Erik Baumgartner wrote:

I did quickie Lightroom edits on a few RAW images from the X-H1 sample gallery with my default Fuji profile. These aren't in the greatest light, and I did give the WB a little tweaking here and there where it was obviously off, but these basically look how they look and I think the skin tones are fairly decent, no?

You're good in the dark of the Lightroom, Erik. Those are all better than the out-of-camera equivalents in the sample gallery.

At high ISO Fuji apparently does a lot of noise reduction, which reduces sharpness. Whatever noise reduction you did, less so. Nothing wrong with white balance or skin tones, either way.

Thanks, with Lightroom, a RAW file and a little know-how you can get the color to look however you want it to look. Whether you want your Sony files to look like Fuji's or the other way around, you can do that. There's a lot more to Lightroom beyond the default import settings and the basic slider adjustments that most people never really learn to make the most of.

RAW files are not images at all, just raw sensor data that can be interpreted and processed in many different ways. Whatever beautiful or horrible color you are seeing in Lightroom, Capture One (or whatever) was applied to the colorless RAW file by that editor. If the files from one camera can have great color, the files from a different camera can have great color too.

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.

Some custom import settings and a different color profile (or customizing your own) will go a long way towards achieving better results in any editor.

Erik Baumgartner wrote:

Thanks, with Lightroom, a RAW file and a little know-how you can get the color to look however you want it to look. Whether you want your Sony files to look like Fuji's or the other way around, you can do that. There's a lot more to Lightroom beyond the default import settings and the basic slider adjustments that most people never really learn to make the most of.

RAW files are not images at all, just raw sensor data that can be interpreted and processed in many different ways. Whatever beautiful or horrible color you are seeing in Lightroom, Capture One (or whatever) was applied to the colorless RAW file by that editor. If the files from one camera can have great color, the files from a different camera can have great color too.

Some custom import settings and a different color profile (or customizing your own) will go a long way towards achieving better results in any editor.

I agree.  I never used the supplied profiles from ACR.  I always made my own "simple" profiles from a ColorChecker card.  I say simple because I didn't really do anything to tweak it.  It was just a way for me to get the same color regardless of which camera I was using.  Lately, I'm liking Adobe Color for my landscapes and birds, however.

Skin tones can be funny.  You can white balance the photo the way you think you should by using the eyedropper on a neutral patch in the photo.  But I have rarely found that to yield "acceptable" skin tones.  If I'm doing a people photo I almost religiously check CMYK values.  I'll set my WB to yield what I want in CMYK skin values.

In any event, I have used cameras going back to the Nikon D100 up to D850 and Z7.  And Fuji X-E3, X-T2, and X-H1.  I've never seen a noticeable difference in color output in my processed files.

DarnGoodPhotos wrote:

Batdude wrote:

Is there some kind of conspiracy going here?

Yes...they're all out to get you.

Must be El Chupacabra!

They may pay Adobe; but obviously not enough! Both Capture One and DxO Photolab do a much better job with Sony files. In fact I have stopped using Adobe after I got my a6500 and now use DxO Photolab (Camera One does just as good a job but the NR in DxO makes it the first choice for me.)

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.

Batdude wrote:

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.

Could you post a couple of these images you're comparing? It's entirely possible that we simply have different ideas about what looks right ...and that's OK, but I may be able to help you get your mages to look the way you want them to without the hassle of you upending your workflow with a new RAW editor and/or a new camera system.

Erik

Batdude wrote:

The reason why I'm asking this is because lately I have been testing out a few other camera brands . . . .

fwiw thomas knoll--the originator of photoshop, its lead developer until cs4, and current contributor to adobe camera raw (i.e. the raw engine behind lightroom)--shoots canon.

i proof hundreds of files every day from many different cameras--i see canon, sony, nikon, fuji, even olympus and panasonic files galore--and the moment i learned that thomas knoll was a canon guy (a while back), i suddenly felt like everything about how lightroom / acr handles various files made sense.

because honestly, it has always "felt" to me like the math underlying lightroom-acr slider functions and transitions was conceived "canon first" and then applied to other brands with varied levels of success or degrees of compromise.

everyone will see it differently, of course, but i've always felt lightroom-acr is at its worst with files from fuji, from the early nikon "gen 2 / picture-control-era" cameras (d3 / 4 / 700 / 800 / 300 / 90 / 7000) and from sony cameras before the third-gen a7 bodies (a7, ii, a6000, etc.)

if i had to pick the files i least like proofing with adobe, they'd definitely be from the nikon d800 and sony a7 / a7 ii cameras. there is a sallow skunkiness to d800 and early a7 files in adobe that . . . i just can't. no lies, i groan when i seem them in my queue--which, fortunately, is happening less and less as we move on from them. d810, d850? better. a7 iii over a7 ii / a7r ii? much better. i'm not knocking the cameras themselves, by the way--they're all fine tools. adobe just doesn't handle some of them harmoniously, and that's on adobe.

i would seriously, seriously recommend either capture one pro or the mfr's bundled / oem converter for owners of those early sony a7 cameras, for those early "gen 2" nikon cameras, and for fuji owners, frankly. tiff a flat-netural-balanced 16-bit file into lightroom from the oem converter (capture nx-d, etc.) if you absolutely have to use lightroom's tools or cataloging--your life with color will be a whole lot easier. otherwise, capture one's deeper color controls and camera-specific iec profiles make working files from those bodies a far more productive proposition

Batdude wrote:

DarnGoodPhotos wrote:

Batdude wrote:

Is there some kind of conspiracy going here?

Yes...they're all out to get you.

Must be El Chupacabra!

Or the creature from the bias lagoon.