Adobe released Lightroom 5.4 last week, a ‘point release’ I wouldn’t normally get excited about, but this one happened to include very-long-awaited official camera profiles for Fujifilm’s X-Series cameras. Ever since the Release Candidate of ACR 8.4 a few weeks ago I’ve been refreshing Lightroom blogs waiting for it so I was pretty excited to fire up 5.4 and put the new profiles to the test.
Why the fuss? Well if you’ve ever looked at a lovely Fujifilm X100S JPG and the default Lightroom treatment of the equivalent .RAF file, you’ll know! Lightroom made those raw files look pretty grotty in comparison, especially skin tones. Oh God, the skin tones… Of course that’s as it should be really: the JPGs look awesome because of the excellent X-Trans processing engine, whereas the raw files are meant to be a neutral starting point with all the image information available to play with.
The problem was I’d been spoiled by Adobe’s excellent Nikon camera profiles which get my D700 raw images as close as possible to how the camera is set up, ready for basic exposure and white balance tweaks. When I started using the X100S with the D700 on jobs it was a lot of hassle getting the X100S raw files anywhere close to the JPG colours I wanted.
In the end I came up with my own Develop preset for the X100S .RAF files that fudged around with saturation and colour sliders enough to as-close-as-dammit match the ‘Standard/Provia’ film simulation mode I used most often, fixing the over-saturated-lighting problem along the way, but it was never quite right, especially in the skin tones.
Now I don’t need it any more!
So are Adobe’s Fujifilm Camera profiles any good?
Yep, they’re fantastic. In short, if you want to shoot raw with your X-Series camera, the magic of those Fujifilm JPG colours is now just one click away in Lightroom – pretty much.
They show up automatically in the Camera Calibration panel in Develop, so long as you’re looking at a raw file from a supported supported X-Trans camera. Just click where it says ‘Adobe Standard’ to reveal the list.
Bear in mind they’re not absolutely precisely identical. The X-Trans engine does its own on-the-fly work on each image so a preset will never 100% match but for me the only noticeable differences tended to be in shadow contrast, but they were only obvious while obsessively flicking back and forth between them and you can just apply a bit of a curve in a Preset if you find it’s an issue. Also, the profiles don’t add sharpening or noise reduction of course, but again you can apply those yourself in Lightroom.
It’s the colours that we want and they’re great, especially those skin tones! Depending on the situation there’s some subtle differences in shades of colour: for example to my eye the Standard/Provia profile needed a little tweak in the greens and yellows in the Colour panel. I’ve saved the Provia profile plus those changes as a new User Preset that I can apply on import to all my Provia-shot .RAF files and now I have even less work to do on each shot in the edit.
Thank you, Adobe! It took long enough, but you got there in the end! It’s making that already-tempting Fujifilm X-T1 purchase seem even easier now…
Must… resist…
(UPDATE: I totally didn’t resist. Now I’m using Fuji X almost every shoot!)
Top tip
Because you can’t select Camera Profiles to apply on import like you can with Develop Presets I recommend you create nine new User Presets each based on one of the nine Fujifilm Camera Profiles now included in Lightroom 5.4 (plus any custom tweaks you want to make). That way it’s super easy to apply one of the profiles as you import your .RAF files, or easily apply them to batches of images if you used multiple film simulation modes during the shoot.
And now, a gallery
I went back through my Lightroom catalog filtering for X100S .RAF files and picked out a few ‘arty’ ones to try the profiles out on. I played mainly with the Provia, Velvia and Monochrome+R profiles, with some extra tweaking in Lightroom here and there.
On my X100S I have a preset in the Q-menu for ‘Mono+R, +2 Shadows, +2 Highlights’ so in Lightroom I recreated that with a fairly typical S-curve and saved it as a User Preset. I also created a ‘filmic’ version of my Standard/Provia look that uses a Curve to fade blacks a little, spill a soupçon of magenta in the shadows, and add a teeny tiny smidgeon of a hint of soft vignette.
Hope you like, thanks for reading!
HI Owen,
Only just found your site through the fuji connection. I’m currently exploring various different film emulation looks, mainly with Totally Rad and VscoCam but really like the ‘look’ of the fuji films, Veliva, 440H etc. Your images are lovely. Bright, crisp and not overdone. Even the wife likes them! Could you list what camera profiles you used on each of the above photographs. I particularly like the look of the lady on the green sofa and the car wing mirror.
Thanks Owen. Added to my photographer bookmarks to follow.
Alan
Hi Alan, thanks for the comment! Yeah I like using my own variations on a few of my very favourite VSCO filters, but all these were processed just using Lightroom’s new built-in Camera Profiles for Fuji X-Trans .RAF files. I had to dig through LR to find the originals to see what profile I’d used on the two you mentioned: Provia for both of them.
Just be aware that the Profiles in Lightroom, and the in-camera simulations they mimic, are quite different in appearance to similarly named presets in something like VSCO!
Hello, Owen!
Thank you for the brilliant transperency of your explanation. What kind of screen do you use while working with photos, do you use Apple Retinaor other brands? Is it important to use matte, or glossy screens?
Hi, happy to help! I just use a late 2012 iMac, so it’s not Retina but to be honest I don’t really subscribe to the fuss about Retina. It does look good, especially on my iPad, but on this lovely screen I don’t find myself desperate for higher res :)
Regarding glossy screens the problem is reflections. The new iMacs, including mine, have glossy screens that have been treated with anti-reflective surface covering and it’s amazingly effective.
There’s the concern that perhaps your colours and blacks look a bit deeper than they really are on such screens so you would want to calibrate with one of the many products out there but I don’t have any of the recent ones so can’t advise there.
I guess ideally you want a non-glossy monitor with a hood that works well with calibration software, but it depends on your needs and your budget!
Hope that helps!
That’s what I need, a step by step instruction. I must did something wrong and confused myself before. Now my weekend will not be bored.
Owen, Thanks very much for sharing your knowledge,
Vincent H.
I hope you work it out, Vincent, let me know if you’re still stuck!
Hi Owen
I am new to RAW and Lightroom 5.4, so I do not know what to do with your statement: “Because you can’t select Camera Profiles to apply on import like you can with Develop Presets I recommend you create nine new User Presets each based on one of the nine Fujifilm Camera Profiles now included in Lightroom 5.4 ” Would you please help explain a little ?
I enjoy reading your writing. Thank you very much.
Vincent
Hi Vincent,
Okay I’ll try to explain it for you!
Camera Profiles and Develop Presets are two completely different things. A Develop Preset is where you take a bunch of adjustments you’ve made in the Develop module (for example, say you’ve adjusted White Balance, Contrast, Highlights, some of the Colour sliders, and sharpening) and save them as a Preset in the column on the left. You give the preset a name and then whenever you click on that Preset all those adjustments are applied at once to whichever photo or photos you’ve selected.
Furthermore, you can apply a Develop Preset to photos *as you’re importing them into Lightroom*. Let’s say you’ve come up with a great look which you’ve saved as a Preset called ‘MyLook’. Now pretend you want to apply it to 1000 photos you’re about to import from a memory card. Rather than importing the memory card, THEN selecting the 1000 photos and THEN clicking the ‘MyLook’ preset, while you’re in the Import screen you can tell Lightroom to apply ‘MyLook’ to all the images as they’re being imported.
Okay, now Camera Profiles. You may know, RAW image data is just that – raw data. It hasn’t been interpreted yet. Nobody has told it how the yellows should look, how the reds should look, etc. So when Lightroom shows you a RAW file it’s using the Adobe Profile to interpret the data to a baseline standard, usually pretty dull and flat, as it should be at this stage.
When a camera takes a JPG image it applies camera- or brand- specific rules to that data. This is why a Nikon JPG and a Canon JPG of the exact same image, would look slightly different. Those rules can be recreated with Develop sliders, but the better way is to apply an appropriate ‘Camera Profile’ in Lightroom first. Camera Profiles in Lightroom are a series of tweaks that are specific to particular cameras or brands of camera, based on how that camera is known to treat colour data etc when a JPG is taken. For example, there’s a stack of Nikon-specific profiles supplied with LR that make RAW images look like the JPG a Nikon camera set to D2X Mode II would produce.
In Lightroom, Camera Profiles aren’t really meant to be tweaked by us mere mortals and only offer a few colour tint sliders to fine tune the profile. An appropriate choice of Camera Profile provides a more accurate starting point for your RAW file before you go adjusting in Develop. Or you can just leave it on ‘Adobe’ and Develop away as you like ;)
Getting back to your question: Camera Profiles cannot be applied to images as you Import them, but Develop Presets can be applied as you Import them. Why would you want to apply them as you Import them? Simply because it’s a little quicker and streamlines the process. You can *always* go and change the Camera Profile after you’ve imported, remember.
But if you want to apply a Camera Profile to images as you’re importing them, the only way is to save a new Develop Preset that includes that Camera Profile, then apply that Preset during Import.
For example, if you’ve taken a whole bunch of RAW images on your Fujifilm X-series camera and want all those images to look like the ‘Provia’ JPG look that’s built into the Fuji cameras, you could just import all the RAW files and then go to Develop, select all images, turn on Auto-Sync, go into the Camera Profiles panel and select the Lightroom Fuji Provia profile.
Or, you could save a new Preset that makes use of the Provia profile (and whatever other tweaks you want, such as sharpness for example) and call it something like ‘Provia look, +sharpening’. Then when you import the RAW files you select this Preset and the Camera Profile will be applied automatically and you don’t need to remember to do anything.
Hope this makes sense! Probably a bit long-winded… Ask if you’re still confused :)
Hi Owen
Thanks for taking the time explaining this things for me. I quit taking photo for a long time due to lots of reasons, my last camera was Nikon F4. Read and see photos about X100(s) make me interest in taking photo again. Back to Lightroom (5.4), when I import .RAF file , the Camera Calibration just grey out and I don’t see Adobe standard 9 presets as shown in your article.
I will read your reply (slowly) and try to figure it out.
Thanks again Owen
Hi again,
When you say Camera Calibration is greyed out, can you talk me through exactly what you’ve done up to that point? I’m guessing:
– inserted memory card
– opened Lightroom
– opened Import page
– imported your RAF files from the card
– selected a RAF file once it has imported to Lightroom
– opened the Develop module
– scrolled down to Camera Calibration panel
All correct so far?
At this stage the Camera Calibration panel should be selectable and currently showing the Adobe profile. Clicking on the Adobe profile should reveal a drop down menu with the new X-Trans film simulation modes listed as per the screenshot.
You aren’t seeing that? Can you take a screenshot of what you are seeing and email it to me?
I’ve been trying to get this info out of dpreview forums. I’m colour-blind so knowing I can get the Fuji skintones without doing it myself is crucial. This also helps me with the possibility of upgrading to the newer fujis as the high ISO jpegs seem to do dreadful things with skin texture that RAW sidesteps. Thanks, Owen!!
You’re welcome, happy to help! I personally keep the NR turned down to -2 for JPGs but even then it’s still not actually ‘off’. For professional work with it I shoot RAW anyway so I can have control over that side of it like you say.
I’m sure if you were to be hyper critical you could find some kind of flaws with the skin tone reproduction, it’s up to you how nit-picky you want to be about it. Not to criticise forums in general, or even DPReview, but there’s always a section of every community that likes to be that picky, and I think to all intents and purposes these Adobe profiles for X-series film looks are a superb starting point!
Thanks for the explanation and tips. I needed your help to locate the profiles in the camera calibration panel. I followed the tip to create new presets ;-)
No worries, happy to help Christian!