I posted earlier about how adding a Look-up Table (LUT) makes color-grading easy. Unfortunately, putting a LUT into ACR/Lightroom isn’t exactly straightforward. The key is to create what’s called a “Creative Profile” that includes the LUT as part of its instruction set. ACR/Lr profiles come in two types:
Camera Profiles: These are fundamental settings for how ACR/Lr decodes your camera’s raw file. The default is Adobe Color, which is a modified version of Adobe Standard. Camera profiles are unique to each camera make and model, and are designated by the .dcp file extension.
Creative Profiles: These profiles include image enhancements, including white balance, color shifts, and other adjustments that you can make in your editor. These profiles are saved in .xmp format, and apply their effects without changing any of the control sliders in the Develop panels. You can apply creative profiles to both raw and JPEG/TIFF files, but in order to work on different camera raw files, the underlying camera profile that’s associated with your creative profile must be one that works with all cameras (ie, Adobe Standard).
Get My Color and Monochrome Film profiles for ACR/Lightroom!
Listen to this episode with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Photographer's Perspective to listen to this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
