This also works with ACR & Lightroom but Datacolor takes a different approach. There is another camera calibration application offered by Datacolor.
Adobe’s DNG Editor is much more robust and it offers editing functionality so you can tweak the profile to your liking – I offer some detailed instructions for such tweaking for better skin tones in my Skin book. The X-Rite software is very simple and straightforward, you run it on a DNG file and it generates a profile and saves it into the appropriate place for ACR access. Both also utilize the X-Rite 24-patch ColorChecker target for calibration.
At any rate, some time after the software was introduced, X-Rite developed a calibration software of its own, available as part of its ColorPassport package, but also available as a free software download – you can get it here:ĬoloChecker Passport application – I believe this is the Mac version, you can probably download the Windows version from X-Rite’s support page here:ĬolorChecker Passport Support– click on the support tab and then on the software downloads to see the application and the Lightroom Plugin.īoth the Adobe DNG Editor and the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport application generate a special dng profile that can be used in ACR. This collection of default profiles can be accessed from the Calibration tab in ACR as shone below…įor some odd reason Adobe has never made this software widely available – you really have to hunt for it to find it.
This little application can be used to build a custom ACR calibration profile that can be used inside ACR to support your specific camera sensor with a more accurate color rendering than the default profiles that come with ACR. Eventually Adobe made their DNG Profile Editor available as free beta software. Initially, this method was only available to Adobe technicians, and was used only to generate support for the different cameras as they became available.
To achieve this support for new cameras, without the help of the camera manufacturers engineering staff, Adobe had to develop a method of calibrating ACR to generate color accuracy with a wide range of different sensors.
ACR also supports more cameras than most of the competing software, and manages to update rapidly to support the newest cameras. Today there are several different Raw processors, and each has something to offer to their users, but ACR dominates with a much larger user base, due in large part to its integration with Photoshop, and a superior interface. There were a few third party applications that were attempting to work with the major camera brands but nothing like Adobe’s offering which rapidly became the standard against which everything that followed would have to compete. Camera manufacturers had their own software to support only their own cameras, and for the most part, it was pretty dreadful. When Thomas Knoll created Adobe Camera Raw there was no universal Raw processor that worked with the majority of digital cameras. Custom Camera Calibration for Adobe’s Raw Process Engine