New Nikon D3, D300, and D700 "Camera" v3 beta profiles

Question

Hi everyone,
I have posted a zip file containing updated "Camera" color profiles (Camera Standard, Camera Neutral, etc.) for the Nikon D3, Nikon D300, and Nikon D700. The zip file contains a copy of the readme, but I'll post it here for convenience, too:
For lack of a better name, I am calling these "v3" beta profiles.
BETA RELEASE NOTES
Overview
These updated Camera v3 beta profiles for the Nikon D3, Nikon D300, and Nikon D700 are designed to reduce banding and highlight color artifacts. They also address the "too bright" tone curve issues with the previous "v2" version of the D3 and D700 profiles.
IMPORTANT NOTE: When using these v3 beta profiles, if you wish to match the default tonality of Nikon's Picture Controls (e.g., match View NX / Capture NX), you must set the Exposure slider in Camera Raw / Lightroom to -0.5.
Of course, feel free to adjust Exposure to make your image brighter or darker as you like. But in terms of matching Nikon's default tonality, you must set the Exposure slider to -0.5, or the default will be too bright.
For workflow convenience, you can use presets in Camera Raw / Lightroom to take care of both (e.g., simultaneously set the profile to "Camera Standard" and set Exposure to -0.5).
Installation
If you are on Mac OS X, drag the "Camera v3 beta" folder to:
    /Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/CameraProfiles
If you are on Windows XP, drag the "Camera v3 beta" folder to:
    C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Adobe\CameraRaw\CameraProfiles
If you are on Windows Vista or Windows 7, drag the "Camera v3 beta" folder to:
    C:\ProgramData\Adobe\CameraRaw\CameraProfiles
Note that the above path on Windows Vista and Windows 7 may be hidden by default. Check your folder settings.
Feedback
The profiles are currently in beta status. Please provide feedback via the online Adobe user-to-user forums here:
http://forums.adobe.com/community/cameraraw
http://forums.adobe.com/community/lightroom
Thank you!

Answer 1

Vit Novak wrote:
It's because ACR assumes that exposure slider at 0 actually means exposure correction of +0.5 EV for this camera model, so with expsure slider at 0, upper 0.5 EV of histogram is clipped
If this bothers you, there is a workaround - convert NEF to DNG, then change BaselineExposure tag in a dng from 0.5 to 0. There are several utilities for this
Or wait for some future version of ACR where this will be solved
The BaselineExposure used by the DNG spec and ACR can complicate ETTR exposure. A uniformly lit surface, when exposed as determined by the standard ISO light meter, should result in 0.18/sqrt(2) or 12.7% saturation of the sensor according to the ISO 12232 saturation standard. This is the standard used by DXO and it allows 0.5 EV highlight headroom. For ETTR exposure, no (or minimum) headroom is desired and mid-gray (18% reflection) is 2.5 stops below 100%.
For example, I exposed a gray card according to the camera light meter reading with the Nikon D3. The resulting 12 bit data number was 497 and the saturation is 497/4095 = 12.1 % saturation, which is very close to the expected value of 12.7%, confirming that the light meter and sensor are properly calibrated. The corresponding pixel value in 8 bit sRGB is 99.8 as shown.
The raw file can be rendered into sRGB with in camera processing or Nikon NX2, which closely approximates in camera processing. With the Standard Picture Control, the camera sRGB value is 150. This is a hot tone curve and the a highlight with 100% reflectance would be clipped. The table below shows the results with ACR and various presets. If one uses the Adobe Standard camera profile, the sRGB value is 162 rather than the expected 99.8 Other combinations are shown. To get the proper value for mid-gray one must use a linear tone curve (sliders on main tab set to zero and a linear point curve) and an exposure correction of -0.5 EV to compensate for the +0.5 EV BaselineExposure. With no exposure correction and a linear TRC, the sRGB value would be 116, very close to the calculated sRGB value of 117 for mid-gray (18%). However, the linear TRC gives a flat appearing image.
The take home point is that if you use Adobe Standard with no exposure compensation with ETTR, your images will appear overexposed and lead to cutting back on the camera expoure. The raw file highlights will have values well under sensor saturation.