I recently upgraded to Adobe Lightroom 3. For those who are unfamiliar with it, Lightroom is an amazing piece of software. I've found it to be a great help in keeping my photos organized, as well as make my post-processing MUCH easier to deal with. What used to take several layers and a lot of time, I can now get finished in a matter of seconds, especially when shooting camera raw.

Join Richard Harrington for an in-depth discussion in this video, Creating a custom profile with Adobe Lens Profile Creator, part of Creating Presets, LUTs, and Profiles for Photography. Legacy Lenses (glass) and Adobe Lens Profile Creator Lens Profile Creation Analysis August 24th, 2014 Jon Leave a comment Go to comments So I recently came across my father’s old stash of analog SLR cameras and it occurred to me that I could probably reuse those lenses (Olympus OM 50mm f1.4 and Helios 44-2 58mm f2.0) on my NEX 5R.

Anyway, after the upgrade, I was poking around online for tutorials to learn how to use some of the new features, and found that Adobe had released something called the Lens Profile creator, which can be downloaded for free at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lensprofile_creator/. The program comes with a selection of PDF files which are black and white checkerboard patterns of different sizes (grid size and block size). Ideally, Adobe recommends (for a prime lens) at least nine different photos at each of three different distances at three different apertures each. Yes, this amounts to one heck of a lot of photos.

Adobe Lens Profile Creator Tool

I decided to give it a whirl, because I've been using my wide angle lens a lot more than I used to lately, and much like most lenses of this type, there's a bit of vignetting (darkening) around the edges, and I really hate how straight lines get pulled, especially in the corners.
After a trip to Kinko's to have the largest grid printed (my printer can only handle up to 13' wide paper), I went into my studio space, and set up the first of the grids on a piece of foamcore (also from Kinko's) on an easel, and set up a pair of daylight balanced fluorescent bulbs equidistant from the board, and at 45 degrees to it. After about an hour, I downloaded everything to the computer and got started.
First off, if you're going to do this, one word of advice, WATCH YOUR EXPOSURE. because the grids are black and white, getting your camera's exposure meter to read everything correctly is tricky (it works on to try to get the mid point to match an 18% gray card. Since there's no tonal midpoint in these grids, it will likely get confused). Also, I had found some instructions somewhere that led me to believe that before you get started, you can make any normal raw adjustments before you import the photos into the program. Unrortunately, I found that if you're working in raw, for some reason, the profile creator WILL NOT look at the sidecar file. So after I got everything imported, and set up, I let the computer do its thing, for six hours! I think a lot of that time was because the exposures were a little less than optimal on a number of the photos.

Adobe Lens Profile Creator 1.0.4

How To Use Adobe Lens Profile Creator

So after all was said and done, I saved the lens profile, and got back to work. Here are a couple versions of the same photo from my Philadelphia trip, before and after applying the lens profile, with no other adjustments made:

Adobe Lens Profile Creator Calibration Chart