An often overlooked segment of photography where digital camera profiles can have a dramatic impact is the portrait market.  One reason for this may be that if you apply a colorimetrically accurate profile to a portrait image, you may find the results visually unappealing.  Comments include: "It's flat.", or "It lacks luster.", or "It doesn't look very life-like."  The best way of improving the final result is to edit the ICC profile to suit your preferences before applying it to your images.

This is evident in the example of a group of portraits shown below.  In attempting to correct for skin tones that are too red and oversaturated, we created an ICC profile with inCamera plug-in and a standard GretagMacbeth ColorChecker Chart.  The result of applying that profile to the images is shown in column two of the table below.  The third column shows the dramatic affect editing the original profile can have on the final result.

The following tutorial explains the process of creating ICC profiles for your digital camera, editing the profiles, and applying the profiles to your images.

Creating an ICC Profile:

1. Have the first person in the photo session hold a ColorChecker chart for the first shot.

2. In Photoshop, open the image with the chart in the scene first.

3. Launch inCamera plug-in and position the flexible template over the chart as shown in figure 1.  Click "OK" to create and save the ICC profile.

Figure 1

As mentioned earlier, if we were to apply this profile to each image in our batch, we would get the results shown in column two of the table below.  Even though the colors of in the chart in the image are now virtually an exact match to the known color values of the real ColorChecker, the overall look of the portrait leaves something to be desired.

Edit the ICC Profile:

4. We can easily achieve any desired look or feel for a portrait by editing the digital camera profile.  Using iCorrect EditLab Pro plug-in, this process is as simple as editing an image.  Rather than applying the color edits to an image, you apply the color edits to the ICC profile.  For this example we made a slight adjustment to the tonal range with the second tool tab as shown in figure 2 and to the contrast and saturation with the third tool tab as shown in figure 3.

Edit the Tonal Range

Figure 2

Edit the Contrast and Saturation

Figure 3

Apply New Profile to Image(s)

Finally, you apply the edited profile to a set of portraits taken under the same studio lighting conditions.  The results are shown in the third column of the table below.  The final results are more accurate than the original image yet more appealing than those using the default profile.

(Click on each image for larger version)

(Click on each image for larger version)