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Lightroom & Skin tones

Many of you will call me crazy, but I got spoiled from the colors (especially the skintones) that I can get from my A7rii in video with the custom profiles. Still profiles in camera just do not have the same customization level as in the video. Even crazier was the fact that I could not get the stills to look as good with Lightroom, unless I spent a significant amount of time fine tuning all different color settings for each picture. While Lightroom offers plenty of controls to mess with color, it still does not give you the full control like 3D LUTs do (check this to see what I mean).
Lightroom has some default camera profiles that you can use but none of them really look that good. For example with the A7rii the default Adobe Standard looks washed out and the Camera portrait has Sony's renowned green-yellow skin tones.
Then I found out about the DNG profile editor, which acts like an LUT editor for stills. It is quite straight forward to create your own custom profile:
  1. Export a DNG from lightroom
  2. Open it with the DNG profile editor
  3. Adjust all the colors you want
  4. Export the profile into the CameraProfiles folder of Lighroom
  5. Open Lightroom and select the profile from the list in the camera calibration tab. 
I made a profile that improves the skin tones for all different light conditions (see picture: Custom - Skin). Attached is the camera profile for A7rii (Sony ILCE-7RM2 Skin.dcp) that you can download and use if you have this camera. Use it, you won't be disappointed. That should correct for the hue shifts, and bring up the contrast and color of the skin. If you want to fine tune the luminance &  saturation of skin, you can adjust the bar for the orange color.
If you don't own an A7rii and you are unhappy with your default colors I urge you to create some custom profiles with the DNG profile editor. It gives you the ability not only to correct the skin tones, but to match the color response of any other camera. For example you can use the image databases of Imaging-resource to create a profile that looks like a Fuji Astia.


Comments

  1. hey, i just came to this post from a dpreview thread. I don't suppose you have a profile to emulate Canon Landscape on an A7Riii? Having recently switched, I find I really miss those Canon colours out of the camera!

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