Lumariver Profile Designer

[Bruce McL]

Lumariver Profile Designer is camera calibration software. It produces Camera Profiles for Lightroom and Photoshop, or ICC Profiles for Capture One and other image editing software that use them. I use it to make Camera Profiles for Lightroom.

Lumariver

Overall Lumariver Profile Designer does a good job turning a DNG image of a color target into a Camera Profile. There is a very good user guide online. It does take time to understand what all of the options do. It took me a few months to really get comfortable with Lumariver Profile Designer.

Lumariver Profile Designer

One thing I like is that I can do things with color and tonality in Lumariver that are very difficult to reproduce (or undo) in Lightroom. Most of these unique treatments are at the edge of the color and tonality spectrum: Very dark blacks, bright colors leading to white, and oversaturated colors.

There are three versions of this software. I use the least expensive version which is for Adobe Camera Profiles only. The next level (Pro) makes ICC profiles and adds some interesting color changing options. The top level (Repro) is for commercial printing (Reproduction, Reprographics). Current prices are 30, 100, and 200 euros.

I think Lumariver Profile Designer is for people who care a lot about the color and tonality of their images and have the time and inclination to do a lot of learning and adjusting to get a profile they like.

I don't have a lot of money to spend on cameras, but I am very picky about color and tonality. With Lumariver Profile Designer I am able make my RAW and DNG images look the way I want them to.

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[bilzmale]

Thanks for sharing Bruce.

 

[Ad Dieleman]

Thanks for the heads-up, very interesting! I'm curious, why did you prefer Lumariver Profile Designer over the free Adobe DNG Profile Editor?

 

[Bruce McL]

The most noticeable thing is that Lumariver Profile Designer does a much better job with highly saturated and oversaturated (out of gamut) colors. There are several useful options for dealing with them.
In general, color transitions seem smoother with Lumariver. The .dcp files are much larger than those created with DNG Profile Editor.
On the negative side, editing individual color patches does not work well in Lumariver, you have to use other ways to fine tune colors.

 

[Ad Dieleman]

Thanks, I think I’ll give it a try.

 

[Bruce McL]

Thanks, I think I’ll give it a try.

I hope it works out well for you.

Here are some notes to hopefully point you and others who are interested in the right direction.

1. Make your first profile as described in the user guide. That means don't change any settings in Lumariver.

Lumariver Profile Designer

Call the profile "Lumariver Standard"

2. Make a second profile, call it "Lumariver Bland." Change the following settings:
Tone Curve tab - change Curve to ACR Black, uncheck Automatic Black Subtraction.
Look Tab - change Tone Reproduction Operator (TRO) to ACR
Look Tab - change Gamut Compression to None
Look tAb - change Base Look to None.

Now you have two profiles you can switch back and forth to see how various features work. Here is what to look for when doing A/B comparison.

Highly saturated and oversaturated colors: Gamut Compression will change the color and tonality in these areas. For my "production" profiles I leave this at the default at all times but turning it off gives a look a lot like DNG Profile Editor. Seeing that look helped me understand what Lumariver is doing in this area.

Bright areas fading into white: The Standard profile uses the Neutral TRO, which will shift colors, particularly reds and oranges, when they get close to white. The ACR TRO in the Bland profile turns this shifting or twisting off.

General Color: The Bland profile should be just that. Using a base look and TRO varient tend to pep up the color. Note that the TRO Varient is only available with the Neutral TRO.

Dark tones (blacks): The difference is subtle, and the difference changes from one image to the next. The Standard profile tells Adobe to anchor the blacks to the left side of the histogram in each image. This anchoring is done after applying the tone curve! It generally makes blacks darker, but how much darker varies from image to image. Turning automatic anchoring off lightens up the blacks in all images. The ACR Black tone curve darkens up the blacks a bit to compensate for the automatic anchoring being turned off.

In night photography I like auto black subtraction on as it makes the sky look blacker. In a redwood forest with sunlight coming through the branches I want it turned off so I get more gradation in the dark areas. Once this setting is specified in the Camera Profile, there is no way to reverse it in Lightroom's edit controls.

For most cameras, the stock Adobe Standard profile has this auto anchoring feature turned on. Other built-in profiles like Camera Standard and Camera Vivid usually turn auto anchoring off. If you import tone curves from other profiles into Lumariver, it's helpful to use the same auto anchoring setting in Lumariver as in the profile the tone curve came from.

I tend to get confused about this auto anchorings setting: what state I want it in and what state it's in on profiles I import tone curves from. Partly it's my fault and partly it's because different software gives the feature different names. Also the way Adobe specifies it in their DNG spec is odd - DefaultBlackRender 1 means auto anchoring off and 0 means on.

Enough with the mini rant about auto anchoring! I hope this post is helpful.

 

[Ad Dieleman]

Thank you very much for taking the trouble to help me getting started, much appreciated! I already bought the license for the Basic version, figuring that I can upgrade if I want to, and I started playing around with some shots of the X-rite Colorchecker Passport and Colorchecker Classic chart. With the Lumariver Profile Designer the Passport chart gives very credible results already, while the Classic chart looks off to my eyes in the deep red (C3) and yellow (C4) patches particularly; might be that there's a mismatch between the version of my chart and the one selected in Lumariver, not sure at this point. The intricacies of gamut compression, tone reproduction, auto black subtraction etc. are the next objects for study and experimentation . The manual isn't half bad BTW.

From my earlier actions with profiles I know it's important to limit the number of profiles in real use (apart from experimentation), because you can't delete them when they've been used for processing pictures. So I'm going to experiment for a while before using the profiles for keeper pictures.

Thanks again, it'll surely take me some time to get some good profiles but I'm confident I'll get there.

 

[Bruce McL]

I use the ColorChecker Passport 24 patch target. I notice a magenta caste when I try the other ColorChecker chart with more patches. Different Base Look and TRO Variant options can affect overall color accuracy as well. Also, it doesn't hurt to run a new screen calibration before diving in too deep!

Yes, keeping a limit on the number of profiles is a good idea. In the beginning I made a test collection using virtual copies of images. That way I could make sure I didn't accidentally put a test profile on a keeper. After testing I just deleted all of the virtual copies.

Jeffrey Friedl's Data Explorer Lightroom plugin has been a huge help in managing my profiles. With it I can easily find images using old, out of date profiles.

Jeffrey's "Data Explorer" Lightroom Plugin

 

[Ad Dieleman]

I use the ColorChecker Passport 24 patch target. I notice a magenta caste when I try the other ColorChecker chart with more patches. Different Base Look and TRO Variant options can affect overall color accuracy as well. Also, it doesn't hurt to run a new screen calibration before diving in too deep!

Agree, all bets are off if the monitor isn't calibrated.

Yes, keeping a limit on the number of profiles is a good idea. In the beginning I made a test collection using virtual copies of images. That way I could make sure I didn't accidentally put a test profile on a keeper. After testing I just deleted all of the virtual copies.

Same here. I also start a profile name with an underscore to indicate it's an experimental profile, example: _ Colorchecker Passport V2

Jeffrey Friedl's Data Explorer Lightroom plugin has been a huge help in managing my profiles. With it I can easily find images using old, out of date profiles.

Jeffrey's "Data Explorer" Lightroom Plugin

That's exactly what I did yesterday, even redoing some images with a newer profile before getting rid of an unwanted profile. We seem to have gone along the same path for a while! Jeffrey Friedl has some great plugins indeed, and he goes out of his way to enable you to keep using them despite the intricacies of developing plugins for Lightroom.

The next few days I'll reshoot the Passport with my most-used set up at present, the Sony A7R2 with Zeiss Loxia 2/35, and play around with the settings in the profile designer. Have to wait now for the sun to go away, I get the best results when shooting outside, the Passport on a grey garden table under cloudy conditions. Most of my pictures are shot under these same conditions.

I have to add that I am, ironically enough, slightly colorblind (the common red-green variant) but that I still manage to wring out pictures that look good enough to people with "normal" vision. Only thing is that I sometimes show pictures in color that no one cares about and conversely that I don't see the magic in pictures like most others do. Oh well. I can always communicate more accurately with others by doing a black-and-white conversion.