Julieanne Kost's Blog

Did you know that you can use the free Adobe Lens Profile Creator Tool to create lens profiles for less common lens/camera combinations? All of the information that you need to know is here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lensprofile_creator/

Note: in Camera Raw and Lightroom, the lens profile popup will only display the profiles appropriate for the file type. So if you’re looking a raw file, you get to see raw-based lens profiles. If you’re looking at a jpeg, you get to see non-raw-based lens profiles. As you can see, we have many more raw-based lens profiles available than non-raw-based lens profiles. This is due to the fact that lens correction quality for non-raw files (JPEGs, TIFFs, etc.) can be very problematic (this is because it depends on where the JPEG/TIFF came from, and how it was previously processed). For example, a JPEG that comes straight out of the camera is very different from a JPEG that somebody created from a raw file in ACR. If you try to apply the same non-raw-based lens profile to these two cases, you can get quite-different results (even though they’re both JPEGs from the same camera and lens).  Thank you for that in-depth information Eric!

In Camera Raw in Photoshop and in the Develop Module in Lightroom, the lens profile popup will only display the profiles appropriate for the file type. So if you’re looking at a raw file, you get to see raw-based lens profiles. If you’re looking at a jpeg, you get to see non-raw-based lens profiles.

Adobe provides many more raw-based lens profiles, than non-raw-based lens profiles. Unfortunately, lens correction quality for non-raw files (JPEGs, TIFFs, etc.) can be very problematic. This is because it depends on where the JPEG/TIFF came from, and how it was previously processed. For example, a JPEG that comes straight out of the camera is very different from a JPEG that somebody created from a raw file in ACR. If you try to apply the same non-raw-based lens profile to these two cases, you can get quite-different results (even though they’re both JPEGs from the same camera & lens). In other words, correction quality is not very stable.

If you want to create and share your own custom lens profiles with the community, click here to download the Adobe Lens Profile Creator and Lens Profile Downloader.

Click here for more information about lens correction and perspective correction in Lightroom 3.