How does Adobe make their camera profiles for ACR and Lightroom?

Question

I'm not interested in the proprietary algorithms , but I am curious as to the photographic mechanics and hardware tools used by  Adobe to make the various camera profiles as they differ markedly from the ones I make using the DNG Profile Editor.
My methodology is to set an X-Rite 24 patch Color Checker target, light it evenly with electromic flash (with 0.1 stops from center to corners as mesured with a Sekonic L-758r Meter) and make a series of exposures bracketed in third of a stop increments around the meter reading in case the camera sensitivity differs from the meter's.
I then process the raw files and convert them to the DNG format, select the best exposure and run it through the DNG Profile editor. My results differ from Adobe's generic profiles for that camera enough that that I don't thin kthe difference can be credited to the difference between a generic profile a specific camera.
How do the different tools work in the DNG converter? Starting with the Options for "Base Tone Curve"? Is there a document a moderately color geeky person can understand that explains this?
I thin kthe DNG Profile editor is a great and under usedtool. I wish more people knew about it.
Thank you for your time and consideration.

Answer 1

Someone who only eats sausage may not want to know how it's made.  Someone who creates things with food, a chef, a cook, or otherwise is thinking about a career in the food industry, might have a interest in such things.  Someone who is thinking of making sausage will want to know all the details.  Someone who is concerned with the public safety might want to know how sasauge is made.
It would be nice for a sausage maker to give some hints about the process as compared to what each of us can do with the DNG Profile Editor and to the original poster's question, why are our profiles different from Adobe's?
It is my experience that when I create a profile with the DNG Profile Editor, and then compute the color error for each of the 24 color patches of a CC24, using a program like Imatest, some colors are quite a bit off and some are very close, and the colors that are off, are not the same ones that are off when I compute the color error using one of the Adobe Standard or Camera Standard profiles.
Is Adobe using more detailed and sophisticated color targets with hundreds of different colors, or if not, do the tools provide more feedback and allow more manual manipulation of the profile and so the differences are due to their judgement about which colors to make "right" and which ones to let have more error associated with them, that can be manipulated by hand instead of merely letting the DNG Profile Editor apparently distribute the error amongst the various colors with some sort of even-handed calculation.
For example it is easy to imagine that someone tweaking a profile by hand with a live readout of the error of each of the colors plus an overall composite error, might put more emphasis on skin tones being right if they have a background in people photography, or more emphasis on bright colors being right if their experience is in textiles and the current trend in the US is bright colors--and a different emphasis when the trend is muted colors so there is cultrual bias and life-experience coloring a "standard" profile.
In other words, how much of the difference between Adobe and our profiles are due to Adobe having different or better science, and how much of it is due to Adobe have different or better "artists" who decide what colors to make correct compared to others.