Macintosh)No, inCamera Professional is a legacy product. It has been replaced by inCamera Plug-in and iCorrect EditLab Plug-in for Photoshop. Both Windows and Macintosh (including Mac OS X) versions of these plug-ins are available.
No. (See FAQ #1)
A very common cause relates to exposure. In traditional, film based photography, exposure is often determined by using an 18% gray card. With this method, you are exposing for proper mid-tone reproduction. With film, the toe and shoulder portions of the D-log E curve provide gradual roll-off of over exposed regions of the image. Digital photography is very different. A solid state sensor produces more and more output as the exposure is increased, right up to the point of saturation where it abruptly "hits the wall." There is not graceful roll-off. Because of this, you should set your exposure so that the brightest white in your scene is close to, but not quite at, the maximum value of 255. This ensures there is no color clipping in the highlights, which will give the profile a much better image to work with.
inCamera Professional is a subset of ColorSynergy, which is also a legacy product. It may be used to create and edit monitor and digital camera profiles. ColorSynergy has additional capabilities, such as the ability to create and edit scanner profiles and printer profiles. ColorSynergy also has many extra features, such as 3D gamut viewing, color palette management and the ability to create custom Photoshop working space profiles. inCamera Professional was available on both Macintosh and Windows platforms, while ColorSynergy was available only for Macintosh.
Not necessarily. Experience has shown that many users get better results with the older ColorChecker chart. There are known problems with using the DC chart with polarizing filters. Some people dislike the glossy patches on the DC chart, claiming that they pick up unwanted reflections that skew their color values. If you use a DC chart, you may disable the glossy patches when the profile is made, to see if that improves your quality.
We have found that exact reproduction of the ColorChecker patch colors produces a flat image. You may easily remedy this by intentionally distorting the patch colors for the sake of making an image look more pleasing to the eye. This may be done in Photoshop by loading a curve such as this one in the Image/Adjust/Curves dialog. Note however, that this curve must be applied to an image after converting to an RGB working space, and it should not be done to a raw camera image having an assigned camera profile.
This is a bug in inCamera Professional 3.1 (Macintosh version only). You should first delete the preferences file, "inCamera Professional Prefs" in the Preferences folder in the SystemFolder. Then download the updater to version 3.1.1 by clicking here (326K).
You might find these charts available in your local area from suppliers to professional photographers or graphic arts professionals. They are also available from various sources online, such as Color Mall.