From the course: Creating Presets, LUTs, and Profiles for Photography

Building a custom Camera Raw profile

From the course: Creating Presets, LUTs, and Profiles for Photography

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Building a custom Camera Raw profile

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- If you want to build your own camera raw profiles, these could become quite powerful. There's a lot of choices that you can make on what's included. To do this, I suggest working with Adobe Bridge, and you could then select an image that you want to work with. I come here and select one of these underwater photographs, and open this is in Camera Raw. Now what you want to do is get a good basic correction. Feel free to take advantage of tools to set a custom white balance, for example. And you can just click right on the histogram here to start to massage the exposure for the image. There we go. I'm going to put a little bit more lift in the shadow and continue to work with the different sliders, dialing in the choices that I want. You can go from tab to tab and start to make refinements here to bring out the type of image that you want. Some choices are not available when we go to save this, so feel free to dial in the type of image you want using the adjustments as you see fit. For example, I'm going to tone down the luminance here of the aqua slightly and the blue and lift up the luminance of the magentas and the purples. I can also decide to apply a profile correction if it's tied to a particular lens and any other adjusts, such as vignetting. In this case, I'm pretty much happy with this overall image. It's not perfect but I like where it's at overall. A little dehaze, looks pretty good, and a gentle lift to exposure. What you want to do now is go on over to the Presets tab, and it gets a little confusing. We learned about the Presets tab earlier when we saved Camera Raw presets but this can also create a camera profile. It's just hidden. What you want to do is hold down the Option or the Alt key, and click on the New Preset button. This will open up a New Profile dialog. Now what we can do is dial in the basic settings. I'll choose to call this underwater, and decide where I'm going to store it. I'm going to make a new group here and name it with my name. Then I can decide what's included. You'll notice that certain things are grayed out. So Basic works and Point Curve works, as does HSL but Split-Toning does not, and things like Radial and Graduated Filters don't come across. You can also decide to automatically adjust the exposure for the image by applying a medium tone map. And then, if you want, you can also decide to attach a Look Table or a Color Lookup or LUT file. I'm not going to apply any of those here but it is an option. Now, when you're satisfied, click the OK button, and the profile is created. Let's go back to the first tab here, and I'm going to reset this image. We'll go back to the default settings. Now, I can jump on in to my profile browser and navigate down to my section called Rich's profiles, and there's Underwater, and you see that all of the color and tone adjustments we made are stored in a single profile. And using this here, I can easily adjust the strength. That's pretty cool but what happens if you want to refine this?

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