The Camera Calibration panel in Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom is a little known gem. Most Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom users will never have used it, but I’m here to tell you that it can be an absolutely brilliant way to add colour, or adjust colour in your images.
Originally added in Photoshop CS3, this tab was designed to be used to calibrate the colour your camera captures against physical colour cards, but that’s all too complicated for me – I just like playing with the sliders!
The Camera Calibration panel in Adobe Camera Raw is activated by clicking on the eighth tab that looks like a piece of a film strip (in earlier versions of Photoshop it looked like a camera). In Lightroom it is the very bottom section in the Develop module navigator.
Fig 1 - ACR Camera Calibration Panel
When adjusting colour saturation with the Saturation or Vibrance sliders in the Basic panel, or with the sliders in the HSL panel it can be very easy to over-saturate them, and to introduce artefacts like banding in a sky.
I find that using the Saturation sliders in the Camera Calibration tab can create a much nicer, more natural, colour boost than the other sliders, and I rarely (never) get any banding or artefacts.
Be sure to try all three saturation sliders (red, green and blue) because due to the way the colours interact with each other they can all play a part in making the desired change.
If you wish to adjust the actual colours also play with the three hue sliders, I find the blue one very useful when that blue sky doesn’t look “quite right”, and the green one can affect foliage nicely, sometimes it is just a small tweak that is necessary.
So, the next time you reach for the standard saturation or hue sliders, think again and reach for the Camera Calibration panel.
This article was first published in the September 2019 issue of Artists Down Under magazine.