A friend called a couple of weeks ago to ask if I had any experience using Canon Digital Photo Professional. The reason was a camera setting that resulted in half of the photographs coming out as monochrome. A Web search told her she could change that setting using DPP. This article on using Adobe Camera Raw, Import Presets, and Camera Raw Presets will offer an alternative to Lightroom.
Picture Style Setting
This article is primarily about Canon EOS cameras but other brands probably have similar settings. To apply slightly different rendering to the photographs, there is a setting called Picture Style. It offers Auto, Standard, Portrait, Landscape, Fine Detail, Neutral, Faithful, Monochrome, and other user-defined styles. If the style is set to monochrome, then the images are rendered in B&W according to what Canon thinks is the best rendering. Since my friend does not use Lightroom to import images into a catalog, each image needs to be handled separately.
One way to deal with this problem is to change that setting to the desired color style and write it back into the image file. But only Canon software can write these back into the file and Canon DPP emerges as the solution. However, this setting can be changed even in Adobe Camera Raw as it is opened on its way to Photoshop. I will present a way of dealing with this accident and then offer other methods that may partially automate the process
Change Picture Style On The Fly
As you try to open the image in Photoshop, it will make a pit stop in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). You will see in the following two screen captures, opening with the Camera Monochrome as displayed in the Profile drop-down window. To change it into any one of the camera styles, click on that drop-down and select the style you want. I chose Standard in this example. This can be done to any RAW image at any time to change the color rendering. For example, the Camera Portrait may be more suitable for portraits, and the Camera Landscape may enhance some frames. But, this is only the beginning.
Create Presets and Use Them
Import presets are not exclusive to Lightroom. If you have created import presets in Lightroom, they will be available and automatically applied if you open a RAW file in Camera Raw. If you don’t have presets, you can easily create them to reflect your sensibilities.
Create Preset
- In Windows File Manager or its equivalent in the world of Apple, select a RAW file and open it in Photoshop
- It will first open in Adobe Camera Raw
- Starting with the Camera Profile, select the profile that should apply to all RAW files from that camera, say Standard in the case of Canon
- Then go through the settings and adjust the most common ones you apply to all your images. And remember, you are not making adjustments to this image, just picking the common settings you apply to most of your photographs. My choices are specified in a previous article. This is a matter of your workflow which may be different from mine.
- Click on the three dots on the right vertical bar to access the menu and select the Create Preset option
- In the new pop-up, select the adjustment blocks that contain the adjustments you made, and remember that you can expand each and select some of the subset items
- Give your preset a name, preferably one that identifies your camera brand and model, and save it
Set Raw Defaults
Using the same three-dot menu heading, select Set Camera Defaults. I prefer to use the camera settings for all my cameras instead of Adobe defaults. Then, for each camera model, you can assign the Camera preset you created above for them. From this point forward, when ACR opens a RAW image from that particular camera model, it will apply the preset you created above. If you have multiple cameras of the same model, you can discern them by their serial numbers. Here are some screen captures for the above steps.
Click on the images to see them larger, uncropped, and read their titles.
Adobe Bridge May Help
In the section above, I provided an approach that handles one photo at a time. Using Adobe Bridge may make things a little more efficient because ACR can be invoked directly from Bridge and file edits can be saved in sidecar files (XMP extension).
If you have not installed Bridge yet, this may be a good time to do that. After installing, start Bridge and navigate to the folder with the RAW files. You can select multiple files and open them in ACR. The open files will show at the bottom of the screen as thumbnails.
Click on the first file, and make your edits as necessary. When finished editing that file, click on the next one and do the same. Repeat until all are done, or until you want to quit. Then, instead of opening the files in Photoshop by clicking on the Open button, click the Done button. All the edits to those files will be saved to XMP files corresponding to each. The next time you open any of those files, they will come into ACR and all the previous edits will be applied.
The first screen capture below shows three files selected and the right mouse button clicked. That will allow us to push the files to ACR. The next image shows files being edited. The last one is back in Bridge displaying the edited image thumbnails reflecting the changes visually and with an additional icon on the top right corner of each file. That indicates that there are saved edits in those files.
I hope these approaches offer an alternative to Lightroom for those who may not want to use it. Questions are welcome, of course!
Haluk Atamal
Interesting and quite useful. I liked it but yet could not find the time to deeply try the presets. I am sure I will have some questions to you – so far my saved preset is lost somewhere; instead I get other “settings” that I had saved years ago. These settings do not always end up as expected. So it might be worthwhile for me to work a bit more, under the light of your nice article.
Thanks for sharing, Cemal.
Take care and best regards,
Haluk
A. Cemal Ekin
Good morning, Haluk. These programs have grown so much that it is hard to keep track of what is where. I hope this article provides a clear path.
Take care,
Cemal