# Camera Calibration - how to match with the camera jpeg output



## victorso (Aug 28, 2012)

Hi!

I'm using the new Canon 650D/T4i and save both RAW and jpeg.  I try the camera profile under the Camera Calibration but the result is different from the direct jpeg out.  The direct jpeg output from the camera has better color and I really want to tune the same with LR.  

Attached picture comparison is an example.  The top is direct jpeg output from the Camera.  For the bottom one from LR 4.1, I did two things only - apply Camera Calibration profile and moved Luminance slide to 50% under Noise Reduction.  It is so obvious that the direct output version has better color.

Can anybody help or give me advices?

Thanks!


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## RikkFlohr (Aug 28, 2012)

Welcome Victor

Why? The JPEG is just your manufacturer's best guess at what might look acceptable. The entire point of shooting Raw is to do better than your camera JPEG. If you want it to look like your camera JPEG, you might as well just shoot JPEG.

You would be far better served to create a custom preset or default that looks the way you want it than to rely on someone else's notion. That way your images would start out better than the camera JPEG.


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## victorso (Aug 29, 2012)

RikkFlohr said:


> Welcome Victor
> 
> Why? The JPEG is just your manufacturer's best guess at what might look acceptable. The entire point of shooting Raw is to do better than your camera JPEG. If you want it to look like your camera JPEG, you might as well just shoot JPEG.
> 
> You would be far better served to create a custom preset or default that looks the way you want it than to rely on someone else's notion. That way your images would start out better than the camera JPEG.



Thanks for the comment.

My problem is that I'm still learning LR and unable to tune the color better than the direct jpeg output from the camera at this moment.  But I wish I can keep to shot RAW and have better LR skill in the future.

So there should be two points:

1. I would need help to give me a little more advice on how I can tune the color on LR to at least match with the upper one.  See the color on the face and lip...  

2. I'm questioning the Camera Calibration function in LR which is not doing what it tells - the effect is not the same as the camera's best "guess"..

Thanks!


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## RikkFlohr (Aug 29, 2012)

The camera calibration panel allows you to do three things:

1. Select the develop *process* for how the Raw file is pulled from your data and displayed on screen.
2. Apply a pre-developed Color *profile* to your image
3. Tweak a profile to account for minor idiosyncrasies in your particular camera's sensor.

You will generally  have your best luck as a new-to-LR user by sticking with Process Version 2012, Adobe Standard and leaving the color sliders alone.  The calibration panel is _not_ designed to approximate JPEGS. You may personally like the look of some of the other profiles and if you are shooting in specialty modes on your camera (Landscape, Portrait, Faithful, etc) you might want to use them.

When a camera creates a JPEG it is doing these things to your image: Applying a tone curve to increase contrast, adding saturation, sharpening, noise reduction, applying a white balance, compressing the data into a smaller color space, saving it as JPEG where lossy compression is applied.

In general, Raw files need contrast, saturation, sharpening, minor noise reduction to look like their JPEGs.


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## GBM (Sep 3, 2012)

Perhaps these would help ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn5VvB32wVI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m44L8o2Fwk&feature=related


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