Having selected the correct profile for my camera I know that the colours and tones will be reproduced accurately as I make my adjustments. Whilst I don’t cover how to do this here I am planning to publish an article on my Lenscraft website in the near future. This does require some additional software as well as the colour checker card but it can often provide a significant improvement.

If your camera doesn’t have other profiles it is possible to create custom profiles using a colour checker card. when I am processing images from my Canon 5D I find I prefer the “Faithfull” profile to 'Adobe Standard' with around 95% of images. If your camera has other profiles available its worth checking these as they may be a lot better than the Adobe Standard profile e.g. Depending on your camera make and model you may find other profiles also listed in the drop down. The default camera profile that ships with Lightroom is 'Adobe Standard' and is responsible for controlling how the data in the RAW file is translated into colours in the finished image. This is located under the 'Camera Calibration' section found at the very bottom of the development tools panel as can be seen in the screen shot below. The first thing I do when processing my RAW files is to select the camera profile to be used in the conversion process. The Develop tools down the right used to adjust your image and which we are looking at in this article.The centre area of the screen showing the image with you are adjusting.Useful tools down the left such as an Image navigator, snapshot, history and Lightroom Presets.The film strip showing image thumbnails along the bottom.You can think of the Develop module screen layout as having 5 areas: If you find you want to select a different image simply use the film strip along the bottom of the screen, clicking the required thumbnail. Click this and you will see a working area similar to that shown below, with your currently selected image displayed in the centre. The Develop module is selected using the 'Develop' link in the top right of your Lightroom desktop. Whilst I will be focusing here on RAW files the principles are similar for adjusting TIFF’s and JPG’s although you will notice some minor differences in the interface. Whilst it’s quite common to think of this module being used to develop RAW files into images, it can also be used to make adjustments to images already in picture formats such as TIFF and JPG. Words and images by Robin Whalley - The Develop module in Lightroom, as the name suggests is where you 'develop' your images.

Lightroom cc develop module