Tuesday, July 10, 2012

QP Card Differences between ICC and DCP Profiles

I've been using the QPcard 203 Book for a few weeks now and have been trying to make it work with Adobe Process 2012.  Unfortunately no matter what I've tried, I couldn't seem to get a DCP profile that was flatter than the stock Adobe Camera Neutral profile for my D800E.  The profile looks OK, and is better than the profiles generated by the Colorchecker Passport, but like I said, still not flatter than the built-in Neutral.

So I tried using the QPcalibration software to create an ICC profile for use in Capture One.  Holy cow, I got a super flat and color accurate image (when using Linear Response Curve) straight away.  Just a little tweak with the skin tone tool, and I got significantly better results than I ever got with DCP profiles in Adobe.

I used Large Gamut, Low Profile Curve, and the High Smoothing settings in QPcalibration.  The QP profile was still very contrasty in Lightroom, even when I dialed the Contrast down by -80.

Here are the results, Lr first, then C1 (the differences are greater on my calibrated editing screen than these small sRGB files will yield, but you can still see the contrast differences in her dress, shoes and face):





So what does this mean?  Maybe the QP Card is only really useful when making ICC profiles for Capture One, and significantly less useful when making DCP profiles for Camera Raw.  That is disappointing as I really want to standardize on Lightroom for raw conversion.  I guess Capture One still wins for best color / contrast / and skin tone.

1 comment:

  1. Hello, could you be so kind and share with me information under which settings of profiling software from QPcard you got acceptable icc profile? I have tried it with the NEF picture I downloaded from QPcard site (as I did not purchased one yet - just wanted to try) and profile which generated and later on I put to C:\Program Files\Phase One\Capture One 7\Color Profiles\DSLR is FAR superior than default CO1 profile. After the applying the profile from QPcard the picture is washed out, very bright and lack of contrast. Is it normal (I mean I can be used to more vivid colours) or I am doing something wrong?

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