Toronto Photography Meetup Group

I shoot in RAW, but I quite like the effects of the Sony Creative Styles (as a good starting point). Nikon calls their comparable feature "Picture Controls", and Canon calls it "Picture Styles", so hopefully if there is a solution to my problem it will apply to all shooters. They typically have names like "Standard", "Vivid", "Landscape", etc...

When a RAW image is loaded into LR, LR will load the image, initially display the embedded thumbnail, and then replace the thumbnail with the LR raw conversion, which generally is not very good. LR has, under the Develop tab an option under Camera Calibration for profiles, which as I have discovered, do an approximation of the Creative Styles. In my case I actually had to find some profiles created by another Sony shooter, but I have them.

Problem number 1 is that LR does not read (or just hides) the tag in the raw file indicating the creative style used when I shot the image, which would be useful during batch processing. I believe I have found a solution involving exiftool that I will attempt to insert into my importing workflow. In short, exiftool can read the Creative Style and write to one of the available tags in the xmp sidecar file (I need to pick one that lightroom will see) -- OR -- I will try to find a lightroom plugin that will allow me to access this metadata field, I think I might have found one.

Problem number 2 is if there is a way to apply that desired camera calibration preset to all the images in the Library (automatically?), instead of having to go to the develop module for every image, or having to copy the processing to those other images (if someone can show me how to do that so I can learn it in the first place...).

Anyway, hopefully this is not a new problem and someone can comment and offer some clarity.

Just a quick thing that I can think of atm, if your adjustments are global, you can select all in library and then sync your settings (make sure the first photo you select is the one you made the changes to)

That explains/clarifies the "develop->copy processing" sequence, thanks!

there is an option to apply settings as default to specific camera serial number. You have to set up all the settings you want in Develop module first, then go to develop menu and select set default settings. Then, when you import your photos from this camera LR will automatically apply the settings you saved to all those photos. One thing I found would work better in the Library module is to have the display mode set to Survey view (N), but make sure you only select one photo at a time to view. You can also have LR automatically render 1:1 previews upon importing

PotatoEYE, it sounds to me like this would only work if I had all of my images taken with a single Creative Style, which is not my intent.

Pretty much