The DSLR Field Guide

Creating a Camera Profile

For the vast majority of us, creating a specific color profile for the camera is not necessary—we’re unlikely to notice any minor color discrepancy, and on the rare occasion when color really has gone awry, it’s usually relatively easy to fix in post-production.

However, camera profiles can be useful when a photographer works regularly in a repeatable kind of lighting. A studio with photographic lights is the most obvious example. Personally, I do quite a lot of location shooting in low sunlight, and so find it useful to have a profile just for this. The profile is a small text file, readable by the computer, that describes the exact way in which any of these devices displays colors. As everything begins with the digital ...