Installing Profiles

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Revised March 7, 2017

Copy them into these two locations for Mac OS X:

Library/ColorSync/Profiles
and
Library/Application Support/Adobe/Color/Profiles/Recommended

or for Windows 7 and later:

C:Windows/System32/Spool/Drivers/Color
and
C:/Program Files (x86)/Common Files/Adobe/Color/Profiles/Recommended

The first location is mandatory for profiles to live (more so for Windows, less so for Mac as there are other folders under OS X where they could be put instead where most applications would still be able to find them), and the second location is useful if you'd like these (or any other) profiles to show up at the top of lists in Photoshop. Putting a profile in both locations will not cause the profile to be shown twice in Adobe's lists because they check for duplicates while making their lists. Windows users must quit and re-launch Photoshop to see newly-added profiles listed (or so it was, last time I checked).

Note that both ACR and Lightroom do now allow you to choose any RGB working space for export. Adobe has made it less than obvious in LR, so be sure that in the Export dialog, after you burrow down into the File Settings > Color Space area, that you choose Other... in the pop-up and then check "Include Display Profiles".

Should you need to replace a profile with an updated version of it which goes by the exact same internal name, then you will need to quit and re-launch Photoshop, even on a Mac (or so it was, last time I checked :-).

When profiles are listed in Photoshop and in most, but not all imaging applications which are ICC-aware, the name of the profile shown in the list is an internal name, not the actual file name of the profile. Usually both names are the same, but when they aren't it can be quite confusing! In OS X, if you double-click a profile, that will launch ColorSync Utility and you will be able to click on the desc tag in the profile and see its internal names (up to three different ones are possible and its normally the first which is used).

IF ANY OF YOU HAVE OLDER VERSIONS OF MY PROFILES: Originally, I took the liberty of putting a "dot" (aka a period) in the names of my master working spaces ahead of the dot near the end. I thought I'd gotten away with this take-a-chance-with-typical-computer-protocol dare until I discovered that Capture One wasn't having any of it. Despite contacting them and advising them of this weakness in their ability to read profiles' internal names correctly (resulting in them cutting off the part of the name after the dot, naturally) they've never fixed their code so that it behaves as well as everybody else's with respect to this detail, so I relented and removed the dot from both the external and internal names of the profile. If any of you have the older versions with names like "DCam 3 J. Holmes.icc" and use or think you might ever use Capture One (a fine program in many respects to be sure) please email me and I will send you newly re-named master profiles to use in their place.

In fact, one of the things I like especially about Capture One is that it contains what they call "LCC" or "Lens Cast Correction". This is actually more of a sensor cast, but that's beside the point. It's a capability which can eliminate both the falloff and color shifting which occurs across an image as a function of the behavior of the lens, the inverse square falloff, the sensor, and if you're doing copy work, the lighting. Part of the reason I like this capability is that I was the one who first suggested to them that they put it into their software. In 1996 or '97 I told the President of Phase One at the time, Carsten Steenberg, in person, in NYC, while I was doing a consulting job for the Photography Department of the Museum of Modern Art, that they should add such a feature so that copying prints in their collections by photographing them with digital cameras could work much better. One year later, the feature appeared.

These days, one can also enjoy Robin Myers EquaLight software, which does much the same thing. Hi Robin!