If you were a film photographer who has switched to digital, one thing you miss is Kodachrome. Digital cameras have given us images that are superior to film by most objective technical measures, but they haven't yet made a digital sensor that looks as good as Kodachrome did 60 years ago.
If you want to get closer to that look with digital, Adobe’s free DNG Profile Editor can help.
With the Profile Editor, you can create camera profiles to be applied to your images in Lightroom or Camera Raw—shoot a Macbeth color chart, bring it into the editor, click a few times, and presto. As it turns out, we can abuse this feature to generate a profile that is intentionally wrong in exactly the way we want.
What
Here is an image with great reds and yellows that screams out for Kodachrome. I got pretty close to what you see here in Lightroom, but still couldn’t quite get the reds I wanted without messing up the overall color. The picture you see here, however, is the result of just a few minutes in Lightroom with a “Kodachrome” profile I generated with the DNG Profile Editor.
How
Have you ever explored the camera profiles available in Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) and wished you could do more? In this video tutorial, I demonstr. Open Adobe DNG Profile Editor and open a DNG image file from your camera (File/Open DNG Image). Set WB Sliders. Next, select the Color Matrices tab in Adobe DNG Profile Editor and adjust the WB temperature and tint sliders. I would recommend settings of between -80 and -100 for the temperature and 0 to -50 for the tint. The DNG Profile Editor is a free software utility for creating or editing camera profiles. “DNG Specification” means any version of the Adobe DNG. The Digital Negative or DNG is Adobe's royalty-free, open standard archival format for the RAW files generated by digital cameras.
First, I took a picture of a Macbeth ColorChecker chart. The DNG Profile Editor uses this chart to correct colors to known values. What I wanted was the exact opposite.
So, I downloaded and installed the demo of Alien Skin’s Exposure plug-in for Photoshop, which simulates a wide variety of films. I ran the Kodachrome setting on my ColorChecker image, and turned the result into a linear DNG file I could load into the Profile Editor. (Later, I took a picture of the chart on actual Kodachrome film and scanned it.)
Loading the image into the Profile Editor gave me a target I could run the calibration on. The result of this is a profile that, in theory at least, un-does Kodachrome’s colors. So, I inverted all the settings, which should do exactly the opposite—apply the color “correction”. Then I threw in a few manual adjustments, and generated a profile. Boom: there are my reds and yellows!
You don’t have to do this.
If you don’t understand the previous section, or don’t want to do the work, you're in luck. You can download my profile recipes right here.
Color profiles are camera-specific, so there’s still a bit of work to do. You'll need to have the DNG Profile Editor installed for this. If you don't use DNG, you needn’t switch to use these profiles: just convert one RAW file from your camera to DNG. You can delete this DNG after generating the profile.
The zip file contains two profile “recipes”, corresponding to Kodachrome 25 and 64. Open the Profile Editor and load up a DNG file from your camera (it is not important what the picture is of). Then choose “Open Recipe” from the File menu and open one of these profile recipes. The Base Profile should be set to Adobe Standard (unless you know why you want something else). Finally, from the File menu, choose Export Profile. This will save a .dcp file, which is the actual profile Lightroom and Camera Raw can use.
The Save dialog should default to the right place to save it. On the Mac this will be ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/CameraProfiles, where it will be picked up by both Camera Raw and Lightroom. There is also a Color Profiles directory in Lightroom’s own Application Support directory. Once in place (after re-launching Lightroom or Camera Raw) the profile will be available.
What else
This profile adjusts colors only. Color isn’t the only thing that makes Kodachrome special, so after applying the profile to an image, you’re not quite finished. You'll want to adjust the contrast, apply a tone curve, and whatever else the image needs.
Don’t be shy with the Blacks slider. Crush the shadows till they scream for mercy! Give it some vibrance, and boost the highlights on the curve. A neat trick is to drop the Saturation quite a lot, then compensate by increasing Vibrance on what’s left.
Adobe Dng Profile Editor For Windows 10
Finally, warm up the shadows using Lightroom’s Split Toning tool. Set the Balance to 85, Hue to 40 (a warm yellow), and Saturation to around 23. Adjust to taste.
I’ve used this profile on quite a few images. You can see a few more by clicking the thumbnails. It doesn’t work for everything (neither does Kodachrome) but when you want the look, this is a whole lot quicker than trying to do it from scratch.
Given that there are no license requirements for the DNG format, Adobe DNG Converter is also distributed completely free of charge and it can be used for both personal and professional purposes. Downloading its setup file may take some time with a slower Internet connection, but the installation process is much faster and it doesn't involve any advanced configurations.
The entire conversion operation can be prepared and executed on a single window. Selecting a source and a destination and clicking a button is sufficient to convert your images, but you can make additional settings along the way. The software can rename the converted images, using one or more templates of your choice.
Advanced settings can be made on a separate window. Adobe DNG Converter lets you choose between several compatibility profiles, for different camera RAW versions, set a full or medium size preview for the images and embed fast load data. Additionally, you can set the software to compress the images and to embed entire non-DNG RAW files inside the output files.
It doesn't take long to complete the conversion process. Depending on your settings, the files will be stored either in the same place as the originals or in a location of your choice. You can also decide if you want to skip source images if the destination already exists before you start the operation.
With Adobe DNG Converter, RAW images can be converted to DNG files in just a few seconds, without any kind of difficulties.
Pros:
The software can process large numbers of images quite fast. The operation can be prepared in just a few seconds. Adobe DNG Converter provides you with a good number of configuration options.
Cons:
There are no obvious drawbacks to address.
You can download Adobe DNG Converter free here.
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