Long time readers will know that I’ve spent quite a bit of time talking about and coming up with solutions to the problem with Adobe’s calibration of Sony raw files. In particular, I’ve covered the A6000 many times, as it is a camera that I own and use regularly. In the past I’ve crated custom corrections by manually adjusting the calibrations by eye. As Datacolor were kind enough to send me their Spyder X Studio package to try and to review, I thought I would see if I could use the Spyderchecker to create a better profile.

To do this, I shot the Spyderchecker in daylight and used the supplied software to calibrate the target. I should point out that this isn’t really the proper way to use this, but it’s something that I wanted to try anyway. Calibration in the software only takes a second. You can send the image straight from Lightroom, and it will send back a Lightroom preset. It does its calibrations by using the HSL adjustments. Pure HSL adjustments aren’t very useful if you want to use this as a template, because you may want to use them with presets or something that will also use the HSL tool. So, to get around this, I converted it into a custom profile.

This is purely an experiment. I know it’s not really the right way to use a colour checker. You should really include it in part of a scene that you’re photographing, and then take the correction from that, based on the lighting in the scene at the time. It’s not really ideal to try and use it to create a template like this, but because the Adobe created camera profiles aren’t great, I thought that it would be worth a try to see if it can compensate for some of the issues with it..

Does it work?

Overall, it’s quite subtle at first glance. I think it is better, but whether or not it solves the issue is open to debate, so by all means download it and give it a try. It’s not a huge difference, but it does seem to add more warmth to flesh-tones. Ideally, this should be tried on portraits, but I don’t really have any. I created this based off the standard profile, but if there If there is good feedback I will try and make ones for some of the other modes too.

This isn't a complete solution by any means. This really only creates a "correct" profile, but there's more to a camera's look than that. Ideally, I would need to do this by comparing colours shot against the JPEG and creating a LUT to distinguish the two, but I don't know quite how to do that (yet) - but it's something I'm looking into.

Anyway, if you are an A6000 shooter, please give this a try and let me know if you think it makes any difference.

Download custom A6000 Colour Profile

If you want to share the results you get with this, you can do so by joining the new Thomas Fitzgerald Photography Facebook group.

More to come on this.

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