Available now: DNG color profiles for Adobe Lightroom

Make your professional photography workflow easier with Nokia DNG color profiles for Adobe Lightroom.

Make your professional photography workflow easier with Nokia DNG camera color profiles for Adobe Lightroom.

If you are a camera enthusiast or a professional photographer and you’ve got your hands on the Lumia 1520 or Lumia 1020 (with Lumia Black update and latest Nokia Camera app installed), you may be shooting in raw DNG format.

The DNG format gives you access to pure and untouched visual information, allowing you to do more with your images using the professional workflow you can use with SLRs.

Some enthusiastic photographers at Nokia started to shoot in DNG format as soon as we had enabled it in our smartphones. In the making they also created camera color profiles for Adobe Lightroom to make their own professional workflows easier and faster.

Anybody can create their own camera color profiles using the free Adobe tools. However, we decided to publish the profiles done by the Nokia employees as a little new year’s present for other photography enthusiasts out there to enjoy.

I sat down with Juha Alakarhu, the head of imaging technologies at Nokia, to learn more about these mysterious profiles. If you’re not familiar with the concept and want to find out more, read on.

What is a DNG color profile?

A raw DNG image file contains a lot of information about the image such as camera details, exposure settings, date, and so forth. A color profile tells even more information about the image – specifically how Adobe Lightroom should convert the colors of the raw image file.

The DNG file always includes the default camera color profile. The default profile in Nokia DNG files can be used for all kinds of lightning.

Today we are releasing three different profiles for specific light sources: flash profile, fluorescent profile, and daylight-halogen profile.

As you might have guessed, the flash and fluorescent profiles are to be used for those light sources. The daylight-halogen profile can be used for both daylight and halogen lighting conditions.

What are the benefits of using a DNG color profile?

Working with raw files and adjusting the colors in raw conversion always means a little bit of extra work, but it’s a process of love. When I’m using a color profile though, I can avoid some of that manual work by simply selecting the correct profile from the menu.

For example, if I know I’ve taken an image using a flash (built-in or external), I can select the flash color profile that will make it easier and quicker to get the colors perfect in that image.

You can still continue using the default profile embedded in the DNG file, and not worry about the specific color profiles we published today. The color profiles are for real enthusiasts anyway, but I guess that’s what we are here in Nokia, Juha laughs.

Is Nokia planning to release more of these profiles?

This started purely as a hobbyist initiative at Nokia and as a result we have now released the flash, fluorescent and daylight-halogen profiles for Lumia 1520 and Lumia 1020.

Let’s see what our in-house photography enthusiasts come up with this year… but I won’t make any promises though.

Any tips for those who are going to be playing with these profiles?

These camera color profiles are only available for Lumia 1520 and Lumia 1020 and will only work in Adobe Lightroom.

I’d recommend taking a backup of the color profiles and keeping them somewhere safe together with a backup of your raw images. If for some reason in the future your hard disk would break and you’d lose the color profile, all your images using that profile would have some color shift.

Finally, play with our color profiles and let us know what you think. You can also create your own personal color profile using the Adobe tools.

Install them now

If you use Adobe Lightroom and want to play with our camera color profiles, download the profiles for your Lumia 1020 or Lumia 1520, and store them in the following folders on your PC or Mac.

Windows 7 & 8:
C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\CameraRaw\CameraProfiles

Mac:
/Users/<USERNAME>/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/CameraProfiles/

Are you shooting in DNG? Have you played with our DNG color profiles? Let us know what you think and share your examples in the comments below.