Canon S100 RAW color issues

Question

Hello, all. I created a thread with this similar issue a few months ago but never really got it resolved. Instead of reviving an old thread, I decided to just recreate it with updated information.
I have the new Canon S100 and I am having an issue with how the RAW files appear in Lightroom.
I import the photos into a Lightroom catalog and they all look fine within the importer window (which shows essentially what a JPEG would look like), but when I click on the photo in Library or Develop, once the photo finishes loading, the red saturation goes through the roof.
Any photo that already had a little bit of warmth to it exploded with red.
Whereas any photo taken in normal light gains a little more warmth and exposure.
Here are a couple examples of the JPEG preview (also how it looks in-camera) compared with what the RAW looks like once it's been loaded in Lightroom. (The above or left photo is the “normal” version, the bottom/2nd image is the RAW)     
It’s sort of difficult to tell with some of the photos by looking at them side-by-side. I also have the individual photos if you want to A/B them to see the changes that are actually occurring.
There are no presets being applied upon import.
The only solution I've found is to convert them all into JPEGs using Canon's software (which does not alter the images as seen above), and edit them in Lightroom as JPEGs, but that completely eliminates the point of buying a camera that is capable of shooting in RAW.
I’ve been having this issue since the S100 first came out (when I purchased it) with Lightroom 3.6RC and was told that it would be fixed in Lightroom 3.6… which it wasn’t… nor was it fixed in Lightroom 4.
I decided to just go ahead and convert all my photos to JPEGs until I found a fix to this so I could at least have my photos (I had photos from my anniversary with my girlfriend in November that I couldn’t do anything with so I was sick of waiting).
I figured I’d wait till more people had the camera, expecting this issue to be more widespread… but now that a lot of people have the S100, I’ve looked around and found no other instances of this happening… so I’m worried it’s something on my end.
I have a 2008 13” MacBook Pro running OSX 10.7.3 and I have the latest version of Lightroom (4.0) and Camera Raw (7.0) installed. I’ve tried the photos in Photoshop CS5 and it does the same thing. When this first happened back in December I tried the photos in Aperture as well and it did the same thing.
The only software that seems to recognize the true color of the photos is Canon’s horrible “professional editing” software.
Thanks in advance.
-Patrick

Answer 1

I recently bought an S100 and encountered the same problem. With Camera Standard in Lightroom, Reds are too bright, greens are shifted towards yellow, and some yellows are shifted towards orange.
I have been using Lightroom since the beta, with different cameras from different manufacturers. The camera profiles for the S100 are the worst I have experienced by far. The profiles, particularly all of the profiles that start with "Camera," do not fit this camera. I believe somebody made a mistake. It could have been someone at Canon, it could have been someone at Adobe. I don't expect this mistake to be fixed, or even acknowledged.
Moving on, here is my workaround:
Start with the Powershot S110 Camera Standard profile.
Use dcpTool to decompile the profile.
Open the decompiled profile in a text editor.
At the top, change the name to S110 Standard.
At the bottom, set the baseline exposure offset to zero.
At the bottom, change the model restriction from S110 to S100
Use dcpTool to compile the modified profile. Give the resulting .dcp file a different name than the original.
Put the new .dcp file in the appropriate directory, open Lightroom and apply the S110 Standard profile to your S100 images.
dcpTool is here:
http://dcptool.sourceforge.net/Introduction.html
This hacked S110 profile gets rid of the blazing reds. It does have some problems with yellows and greens. I solve this in Lightroom by using +20 in Camera Calibration: Green Primary: Hue. I haven't had my camera very long, and I may end up making other adjustments in Lightroom. But using the Powershot S110 Camera Standard profile seems like the best place to start.
I tried using Adobe's DNG Profile Editor app on the S110 "Camera" profiles, but did not get good results. From what others have posted on Adobe's forums, this is to be expected. A lot of the "Camera" profiles are too complicated for DNG Profile Editor to work well on. Both the S100 and S110 Camera Standard profiles have over 23,000 lines of code when decompiled!
I also tried dcpTool (and DNG Profile Editor) with some of the other S series and G series profiles, without finding anything that works better than the S110 Camera Standard profile.