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I have talked to several photographers that have asked if there is a way to preserve the look of their images as they appeared on the back of their camera once they are loaded into Lightroom. In the past, this wasn't possible. But if you asked for it, now you have it! Amazingly, the engineers at Adobe are hard at work creating camera profiles that allow you to get that "back of the camera" look as a starting point for all of your raw image files.

Though this option is still running in beta mode, you can download the profiles here:

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/DNG_Profiles

Scroll down to where it says downloads and installation and choose the link "Download beta camera profiles." Once you have the profiles downloaded and installed they will show up in your Camera Calibration tab in the Develop module. There is a tutorial on how to select the profiles on the page that is linked to above. To select a Camera Profile go to the Camera calibration tab in the Develop module and click on the toggle in the upper right corner of the dialog as in the image at right.

What is really nice about this new feature is that with Nikons the skin tones were spectacular right out of the camera - and the only way to preserve those colors in the past for raw image files was to use Nikon Capture NX or NX2. Now with the Adobe Camera Profiles we can have our cake and eat it because we can get those colors as a starting point for our raw images within Lightroom now.

And if you want to import all of your images and keep the in-camera preview you'll have to create a preset in the Develop module with the camera profile selected that you want to be used on the images as they are imported and then in the import process you just have to choose that template in the Develop settings toggle switch. Pretty simple stuff but very powerful and super exciting for us Nikon shooters at least. I don't know if this was ever an issue for Canon shooters or not.

As you can tell in the images at right there is a subtle difference between the ACR profile and the Nikon D2X profile used in this example. The ACR profile is the top image and the Nikon Camera Profile is the bottom image.

Also, my 124-page updated and revised workflow eBook using Lightroom 2.0, entitled Adobe Photoshop Lightroom: A Professional Photographer's Workflow is finally finished and is available for download. The new version of the eBook includes information on all the new upgrades to Lightroom and how I integrate Lightroom into a complete workflow from camera to Photoshop. If you'd like to check it out click here.

That's it for this week. See you next week here at Inside Lightroom.

Adios, Michael Clark