After buying a Canon 5D Mk2 at the SWPP conference in January I had to upgrade Lightroom. Lightroom is the application I use to do initial editing and manage thousands of images. The current version of Lightroom is able to take advantage of the Adobe colour space, which has a larger colour space than Canon’s RAW file.
This means it possible to take advantage of more colour data captured in the RAW image. This adds even more refinement to using high bit image data, which gives greater tonal control and colour corrections.
I didn’t take much notice of this until testing the camera’s exposure meter accuracy before my first wedding this year, which is in a few weeks. This highlighted the fact that images were captured too dark in the middle grey tones using the standard settings. This means skin tones may be recorded darker than they should for a correctly exposed image. It may also explain the need to slightly brighten images before printing.
All this inspired me to configure the processing of my RAW image files using a technique taught by Dave Montizambert a world expert on lighting for digital. The process requires a Macbeth colour profiling chart, so I took the plunge and ordered one.