Lightroom's New Profile Browser

A little less that a month ago, I posted about Lightroom's Camera Calibration function. On Wednesday of last week, Adobe released an update to Lightroom that greatly improved this capability.

I've been experimenting with the profile browser for the past several days and it is a great improvement. At the top of the Basic Panel in the Develop module is a new profile drop down.

With the previous version of Lightroom, the Camera Calibration panel only contained one Adobe profile, and then the ones associated with the camera that took the photo. The new one contains 7 Adobe Raw profiles, all the ones associated with the camera that took the photo, plus several new categories.

The cool part is when you expand a category. A series of thumbnails appear that show how each profile affects the appearance of the image. If you hover over the thumbnail the profile is overlaid on the selected image:

There are some other interesting features. If you look at the profile browser, you will notice that it is divided into sections. The profiles in the bottom 2 sections have an additional feature. When one of the profiles in those sections are selected, there is a slider that appears that allows you to adjust the affect that the profile has on the original raw file.

Once we have our profile selected, then we can process our raw image just as we have in the past. For this image, I liked the Adobe Landscape profile best. Here is my final image: