My Lightroom defaults now closely match Nikon CaptureNX

Question

I want to speak to anyone struggling with the lack of "punch" and diminished colors of Lightroom compared to their camera manufacturers software (Nikon, and CaptureNX in my case). I can say that at least in my case, I have matched the output of CaptureNX (color and "punch") using a hybrid of 2 techniques I found in this forum. The effort was minimal (less than an hour to set up new defaults for my camera), and it cost me NOTHING! No need to buy a Greytag MacBeth color checker. Because of that, it may not be PERFECT for the purists, but it's close enough to perfect for me and I'll let you judge by my few examples.
I want to thank Eric (Madmanchan) for his EASY to follow instructions on matching ACR to any given manufacturers raw converter. Reading this made my solution possible for me.
http://people.csail.mit.edu/ericchan/dp/acr-color-match/
I used that along with another radical concept mentioned by Will Rees at http://www.reesweb.com/calibrate2jpg. This approach was to try to use a downloadable image of the MacBeth chart, photograph it with Raw+Jpeg, and try to adjust your calibration settings using Bruce Fraser's scripts and ACR.
I decided to instead try the concept of using a RAW image taken by my camera, of a downloadable MacBeth chart image, and then develop that RAW image using CaptureNX. I then followed the rest of Eric Chan's method (VERY easy) to manually calibrate the ACR image to match what CaptureNX gave me.
Once I had the calibration numbers, I put them into Lightroom and saved them as the camera default. The whole process took me about 1 hour, and cost me NOTHING. I have tested this with direct comparisons of the CaptureNX output to Lightrooms now default treatment of my raw images and I cannot say enough how happy I am with the extremely close conversions.
Here is a screenshot of the comparison of my color checker images (the ones I used to compute the calibration)... The one on the left is the NEF developed by Lightroom using the new default settings, and the same NEF developed in CaptureNX. Pretty close IMHO.
http://www.sbsutherland.com/samples/colors.jpg
The next images are a comparison of a sample photo which has a variety of colors on it, using the same new defaults in Lightroom for my camera. Top is Lightroom, and bottom is CaptureNX. I had to boost the brightness of the Lightroom image a bit to make them similar, but that is it.
http://www.sbsutherland.com/samples/photo.jpg
I have yet to find a sample in my collection of photos that isn't really, really close to the CaptureNX colors and "punch". I am not qualified to comment on the itty-bitty pixel level details of the conversions.
The point of my post, is that it is possible to use a combo of the Will Rees, and the Eric Chan methods above to quickly create an acceptable (to me at least) calibration that closely matches the look I was used to out of CaptureNX.
For what it is worth (and I mean that since my numbers seem SO different than other Nikon calibration numbers I've seen)... my calibration settings were (Nikon D70S):
Shadow Tint: 0
Red Hue: -3
Red Saturation: -8
Green Hue: -9
Green Saturation: +38
Blue Hue: 0
Blue Saturation: -28
I would encourage others to try this and I would be happy to try to build a complete step-by-step which combines the two methods. I admit, I had to dig deep (basic algebra) to figure out how to keep the color Values "proportionate" using the Eric Method.
I know that there will be purists that rightly state that a photo of your screen showing a Greytag MacBeth downloadable image is not an accurate way to do this. HOWEVER by comparing the same image taken by your camera off the same screen as you do the adjustments on, using the software you like (with the image the way you like it), and lightroom/camera raw, it is possible to get that image extremely close.
Looking forward to comments (good or bad) on this... Regardless, I love my ACR/Lightroom conver

Answer 1

Thanks for this.
Your numbers are very different from the other numbers for cameras like this purely because you're in fact extracting an approximation of the Capture NX conversion (which is probably far from ideal from a colorimetric sense) instead of to where the patches actually need to come out if you were going for color accuracy. Your method will, in fact, yield what people have been asking for (conversions close to what the camera manufacturers software does) instead of the more correct but duller closer to the actual world parameters that calibrating with a shot of a colorchecker will yield. Very interesting.