Dual-Illuminant DNG Profiles and Lighting Conditions

When you are photographing a scene with distinctive lighting, creating a custom DNG Camera Profile is recommended. However, when you are shooting in routine lighting conditions, such as in sunlight or in a room with fluorescent bulbs, a Dual Illuminant DNG Profile can provide a flexible standard baseline, which you can apply to your images. Dual Illuminant DNG Profiles provide assurance that you can achieve consistent color when shooting in a broad variety of lighting conditions.

To address the way that digital camera sensors respond to different light sources (i. e. from daylight to fluorescent), Dual Illuminant DNG Profiles allow you to measure the color response from two separate lighting conditions and from that information calculate information about your camera’s response in a variety of lighting conditions.

Creating Dual Illuminant DNG Profiles using ColorChecker Passport is a powerful feature and can provide excellent results with a wide variety of light sources.

The DNG ProfileManager displays Dual Illuminant DNG Profiles as well as both illuminant values that were specified during the creation of the profile.

Correlated color temperatures are as follows:

• 0 = Unknown
• 1 = Daylight
• 2 = Fluorescent
• 3 = Tungsten (incandescent light)
• 4 = Flash
• 9 = Fine weather
• 10 = Cloudy weather
• 11 = Shade
• 12 = Daylight fluorescent (D 5700 - 7100K)
• 13 = Day white fluorescent (N 4600 - 5400K)
• 14 = Cool white fluorescent (W 3900 - 4500K)
• 15 = White fluorescent (WW 3200 - 3700K)
• 17 = Standard light A
• 18 = Standard light B
• 19 = Standard light C
• 20 = D55
• 21 = D65
• 22 = D75
• 23 = D50
• 24 = ISO studio tungsten
• 255 = Other light source

This variety of combinations allows you create profiles that are optimized for almost any kind of lighting you may encounter. For example, if you are a wedding photographer who regularly photographs events in the big church downtown, you can create a profile that includes the lighting in the church, plus daylight conditions in the garden outside. This adaptive profile will work well in both settings, as well as a variety of other lighting conditions, so you can concentrate on getting fabulous photos of the wedding couple.