Nikon JPEG creating color effect that is difficult to recreate on RAW version in LR

[Jeremy Payne]

For folks that experiment with the profiles, have you found that it is a setting that you come back to from time-to-time or perhaps frequently or did you settle on say ACR 4.6 or camera neutral, etc. over the course of time and leave it there?   Again, my appreciation and thanks to all.

For me, it has become just one more step in the workflow ... I set the import default for my D700 to the D2x Mode 2 which I find to be the most "accurate", but I do play with the various options during RAW processing.  For the Canon G9, I found Camera Standard to be my prefered starting point.

I plan on profiling my D700 using a custom profile at some point as someone once told me:

"It is much easier to start with reality and start messing with it than to start with a fantasy and try to push that towards reality."

[madmanchan]

Theodore, the good news is that all of the edits/tweaks that you did

(1) can be saved as a preset and/or per-camera default. This means that you can easily apply the same settings to other images. And future images can automatically use these same settings, if you find that you like those results, and

(2) can be undone / discarded with no harm done, so if you decide tomorrow that you actually didn't like those results, you can simply change the settings or toss them away.

To address some of the other questions brought up in this thread: digital camera systems have spectral sensitivities determined by the lens and color filters; they are generally sensitive to the entire human-visible spectrum and so they see everything we see. However, these sensitivities aren't colorimetric and hence recorded colors cannot be transformed into a standard color space without some distortion (e.g., some recordable colors may be mapped to colors outside the target gamut, and the target gamut may also contain some non-recordable colors).

[sandymc]

nor does it require the definition of a translation in CIE XYZ

Yes it does. Read the ICC spec. www.color.com

Sandy

[Theodore]

One cause / effect that may be of some interest to folks, I found that when opting for "Camera Standard" with the D700, if I use the Fill Light slider, the colors desaturate quickly.  The different of the fill-light effect was pronounced vs. Fill Light with the "Adobe Standard" calibration.

[GregW]

I also use the D2x Mode II as a starting point.