Fun with the DNG Profile Editor

If you were a film photographer who has switched to digital, one thing you miss is Kodachrome. Digital cameras have given us images that are superior to film by most objective technical measures, but they haven't yet made a digital sensor that looks as good as Kodachrome did 60 years ago.

Kodachrome is as good a reason as any to pick up the old film camera, but sometimes you want to get closer to that look with digital. I did, too, and Adobe's free DNG Profile Editor can help.

With the Profile Editor, you can create camera profiles to be applied to your images in Lightroom or Camera Raw – shoot a Macbeth color chart, bring it into the editor, click a few times, and presto. As it turns out, we can abuse this feature to generate a profile that is intentionally wrong in exactly the way we want. I'll explain what I did, show some results, and you can download the resulting profile “recipe” to use for yourself.

What

Here (from Flickr) is an image with great reds and yellows that screams out for Kodachrome. I worked pretty hard on it in Lightroom, and in the end, got pretty close to what you see here, but still couldn't quite get the reds I wanted without messing up the overall color. The picture you see here, however, is the result of just a few minutes in Lightroom with a “Kodachrome” profile I generated with the DNG Profile Editor.

How

First, I took a picture of a Macbeth ColorChecker chart. The DNG Profile Editor uses this chart to correct colors to known values. Of course, what I wanted was the exact opposite.

So, I downloaded and installed the demo of Alien Skin's Exposure plug-in for Photoshop, which simulates a wide variety of films. I ran the Kodachrome setting on my ColorChecker image, and turned the result into a linear DNG file I could load into the Profile Editor.

(This also gave me the opportunity to try out the Exposure plug-in. Nice toy, but I didn't end up buying it.)

Loading the image into the Profile Editor gave me a target I could run the calibration on. The result of this is a profile that, in theory at least, un-does the Kodachrome colors. So, I inverted all the settings, which should do exactly the opposite – apply the color “correction”. Then I threw in a few manual adjustments, and generated a profile. Boom: there are my reds and yellows!

You don't have to do this.

If you don't understand the previous section, or don't want to do the work, you're in luck. You can download my profile recipes right here.

Color profiles are camera-specific, so there is a bit of work to do. You'll need to have the DNG Profile Editor installed for this. If you don't use DNG, you needn't switch to use these profiles: just convert one RAW file from your camera to DNG. You can delete this DNG after generating the profile.

The zip file contains two profile “recipes”, corresponding to Kodachrome 25 and 64. Open the Profile Editor and load up a DNG file from your camera (it is not important what the picture is of). Then choose “Open Recipe” from the File menu and open one of these profile recipes. The Base Profile should be set to Adobe Standard (unless you know why you want something else). Finally, from the File menu, choose Export Profile. This will save a .dcp file, which is the actual profile Lightroom and Camera Raw can use.

The Save dialog should default to the right place to save it. On the Mac this will be ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/CameraProfiles, where it will be picked up by both Camera Raw and Lightroom. There is also a Color Profiles directory in Lightroom's own Application Support directory. Once in place (after re-launching Lightroom or Camera Raw) the profile will be available.

What else

This profile adjusts colors only. Color isn't the only thing that makes Kodachrome special, so after applying the profile to an image, you're not quite finished. You'll want to adjust the contrast, apply a tone curve, and whatever else the image needs.

Don't be shy with the Blacks slider. Crush the shadows till they scream for mercy! Give it some vibrance, and boost the highlights on the curve. A neat trick is to drop the Saturation quite a lot, then compensate by increasing Vibrance on what's left.

Or, there are some Lightroom presets for Kodachrome emulation available here (Kodachrome 64) and here (25). These seem to work well along with my color profiles.

I've used this profile on quite a few images. You can see a few more by clicking the thumbnails. It doesn't work for everything (neither does Kodachrome) but when you want the look, this is a whole lot quicker than trying to do it from scratch.

Update: see also my post on shadow warming for another Lightroom technique to get closer to “the look.”

Update: I'm getting a lot of traffic to this page from a post on the Luminous Landscape forum. I'd join in there, but I haven't been able to register. Hello anyway. :)

Comments

[Alan Fairley]

Jeremy,
Thanks for the recipes! However, after I generate the profile using a DNG converted from a Coolscan VI NEF, the profile does not show up in the ACR profile drop down list when I open an NEF in ACR (the custom profiles I made for my DLSR using the Profile Editor do show up when I open raw files from the DSLR). Any ideas on what's going on?

Thanks again,

Alan Fairley

[Jeremy]

Yes, profiles are not applicable to film scans. The "Profile" choice is a little misleading there: profiles can only be used with raw files from digital cameras.

Also, Nikon using "NEF" as the file type for scanned files is also terribly misleading: those NEF files have nothing to do with NEF files from a digital camera. They are essentially just "wrappers" for the TIFF image. There is actually no reason to even use these "NEF" files from the scanner: you can just save the scans as TIFF images. There is no difference at all in the result, and you can still process TIFFs in ACR or Lightroom non-destructively.

[Michael S.]

Thank you for this!

You say that after you load the image into the profile editor that you "inverted all the settings" - can you clarify how you do this? Is this a numeric value that you change?

Thanks!

[Jeremy]

Yes, the settings are numbers. Make the positive ones negative, and the negative ones positive: if you have 10, make it -10, and vice-versa.

[Lars]

Thanks a lot, I've been trying to mimick kodak portra nc for a long time now. today i got the idea to work with the dng profile editor and a demo version of the dxo film pack. then i found this page and you gave me the last clue i needed (invert the settings).

just so i get it right, you invert all the values in the resulting dcpr-file? Or just the values where it says "adjust"?

[Lars]

Forget my question. Got it. (I was already too deep in to see the obvious) :-)

[richard laughlin]

they allow editing (more options) in Capture NX

[Bruce McL]

Thank you for the files and the tutorial. It opened up my eyes in several ways. I'm using Lightroom so the steps are a bit different. I never would have tried without reading this posting.