Master Camera Calibration

Whether you want to calibrate your colours for accuracy or make creative changes to your photos, this powerful panel can help...

If you were to take a raw photo using two different branded cameras side by side, chances are there will be slight differences to the way the photos look when opened in Camera Raw or Lightroom. This is because the colours are rendered slightly differently depending on how the raw data is converted to RGB data. So a Canon Raw file can look markedly different to a Nikon Raw file, even when all the settings are identical.

If you’re not happy with the look of the colours in your photos, the Camera Calibration panel can help. Found both in Adobe Camera Raw and in Lightroom’s Develop module, these controls might seem superfluous in comparison with the other colour controls in the program, but they offer a fine degree of control over correcting colour issues that might affect all your photos.

We’re not talking about issues with white balance: it’s more to do with a baseline colour cast that could plague every photo you open. Think of the sliders in the Camera Calibration as tuning for your camera.

RG B values

Computers don’t see colours, they only see colour values. In an RGB image each pixel will be made up of a certain value of red, green or blue on a scale of 0-255: you can make any other colour using combinations of these three. Hover over any part of the image and you’ll see the RGB values for that particular point. These values get higher for brighter areas.

Custom profiles

If you’re serious about maintaining consistent colours from capture all the way through to edit, it might be worth it to go one stage further than the Camera Calibration panel and instead create your own custom camera profiles. You can do this by photographing a colour chart – many swear by the X-rite Color Checker Passport, which comes with bundled software for creating profiles to use in Camera Raw and Lightroom. After loading in your custom profile, you can apply it in the Basic panel.

Shadows Tint

At varying ISOs, different cameras can present dark tones in different ways. Camera Raw usually stores a database of corrections so that black looks black, rather than dark blue or magenta, but if you notice a slight colour cast in your photo, try altering Shadows Tint. It’s meant for correcting casts in the shadows, so it’ll have no effect on the highlight tones.

Save New Defaults

The Camera Calibration controls are designed to correct colour casts or unwanted tints in whole batches of photos, not just individual photos. So once you’ve used the sliders to correct colours, you can save the edits as new default settings, or as a preset. This way, they’ll be automatically applied to every photo. Click this flyout menu here and choose Save New Camera Raw Defaults.

Process Version

This dropdown lets you choose from past versions of Adobe Camera Raw. In most cases there’s no need to ever change it from the current version. But it could be useful if you need to match a tonal treatment with one applied to an old photo. It can also be interesting to experiment with version 2 (2010), which gives you access to the old Fill Light slider in the Basic panel. While Fill Light is less refined than the Shadows slider that replaced it, it does act more strongly to pull detail out of shadows.

Hue and Saturation sliders

The Hue and Saturation sliders let you fine-tune the distribution of colour in your images. Unlike the HSL panel, these controls make global adjustments that affect all colours, but target some more than others. Hue affects the shade of the colour, while Saturation controls the intensity. For most purposes, Saturation proves more useful, but experiment to get the best results.