Understanding JPEG profiles in raw processing

- Buried deep in your camera's menus maybe something called picture styles or picture controls or film emulation, something like that. If you're a JPEG shooter these are image processing operations that your camera applies to your image when you shoot to change contrast or saturation or sharpness or make the image look more like it was shot with a specific type of film. If you're a raw shooter then these settings have no impact on your final shot. This week on the Practicing Photographer we're gonna look at a way that you can get that functionality back into your raw workflow if you're missing it from JPEG.

So we spend a lot of time saying, oh, you've got to shoot raw, it's much better than JPEG. Why would I be wanting to bring back some JPEG functionality into my raw workflow? If you've played at all with picture styles or picture controls, whatever your camera calls them, you may have found that they produce better looking images straight out of the camera than what you get from a raw file. And that's because a lot of thought and engineering has gone into those picture controls and picture styles and things to make a lot of refined image edits inside your camera. Fortunately when Adobe makes profiles for Lightroom and Photoshop Camera Raw they very often build in support for those same editing sets that you can get from those controls.

They are, they examine them, they take them apart, they figure out what they are, and they build similar features with the same names into Lightroom and Camera Raw. The problem is they hide them deep at the bottom of the editing list, so this may be a feature you don't know about. I have a shot here that I took with a Canon 5d mark three and I'm in Lightroom, I'm in the develop module. If I were in Camera Raw I would have access to the exact same controls, they're just arranged in tabs instead of this long scrolling list over here. I'm gonna scroll all the way down to the bottom.

Again, this was a raw file, so this is what came straight out of the camera. And down at the bottom there's this camera calibration panel. Sometimes it might be closed, so you don't actually see those controls, you just see the name. And by default it says profile, Adobe standard. That means it is using Adobe's standard raw processing profile, which is a very sophisticated one. It's doing a lot of smart work about figuring out how to process the image to keep as much highlight data preserved as possible, to get what Adobe thinks is good color, and while the image may look a little flat it's an image that's very well suited to editing.

This is a nice neutral image from which I can start really moving tones around and doing a lot of things. That's how I usually work, just 'cause that's how I'm used to working. But if I open up this profile menu I see these other things. Camera faithful, camera landscape, camera neutral, portrait, and standard. If you have spent much time in the picture styles section of your Canon 5d mark three menus or that menu in a lot of other Canon cameras you will recognize these. These are the default picture styles that come on those cameras.

I'm gonna set this to camera portrait, because this is in a way a portrait. And when I do that my color and contrast changes. So to me it looks like they've darkened the blacks. I see the change in the histogram, there's a lot more, well a lot more data down here now, that's given me a little bit of a saturation boost. I can't really tell what it's done to flesh tones, 'cause in a way these aren't really flesh tones. But let's take a look at another one. Camera standard. Slightly more saturated reds, still a little bit of darkening over here in the shadow tones.

Camera neutral. This should be pretty close to where I was with just the straight raw file. Camera landscape is, wow, really saturated reds, greens would probably, greens and blues would probably have a big change here. So these, again, are the standard picture styles that I'm used to. If you are coming from a JPEG workflow where you've been relying on these and like having them and are used to them and are feeling like it's a drag to have to do all the editing yourself, this is a way you can get that functionality back. Should you correct things before you apply these? Possibly, if you figure out a workflow that gets you edits that you like.

Let me show you what I would normally do to this image. I would start by putting the whites up to where they need to be, trying to pull out some more contrasts in my highlight detail, I would definitely add some clarity, I'd also crop this a little bit, we don't need this, but we're talking about just color and contrast. So, see I don't know, still personally I like this better than any of those profiles that I saw. If I go apply a profile now, let's go back to the portrait profile, now it's too much.

So their edits stacked on top of mine are going way too far. But as a starting point, if I go to camera portrait first that's not bad. What I would say is wrong with this image is the white point is just weak. If I was gonna be printing this I would want it more like this. I don't really need to do any black point adjustment or anything, because the profile got me there first. So you might find that these are good starting points for things. I'm gonna look at one more image. This is from a Fuji XT-1.

When you're shooting in JPEG mode on Fuji cameras you have the option of emulating very specific brands of Fuji film. If you were a film shooter who was used to shooting with these types of film then this is a really great feature, because you've already got an eye for those color and contrast qualities, and now if you go down here to the profile menu, look at this, Provia, Velvia, Astia, Classic Chrome, Pro Negative, some monochromes with different filters. These are all, again, the same things you'll find in your camera when you are shooting with the Fuji XT-1.

I'm gonna switch over to Classic Chrome, which is a really nice, cool, steely look. Again, I don't necessarily want to apply edits first, but this is a nice starting point. At this point I would strengthen the blacks, maybe pull the shadows out. So Adobe has done an excellent job of mimicking the types of edits that Fuji does when they apply these profiles. Boy, that's Velvia alright. That's a little much. Let's just go back to Provia, which is a nice processed, but still kind of neutral treatment of this image.

Adobe, again, has done a very good job of mimicking what Fuji came up with for these different film styles. So I still say for most things you're doing shooting raw gives you a lot of advantages over JPEG, but boy, having those things that you can automatically apply to JPEG images, that sure is a great time saver, well, you've got 'em. If you're using Lightroom or Photoshop Camera Raw they're just buried way down there in the camera calibration panel there in the profile menu.