]> New Adobe DNG Profiles not showing in Lightroom 🌐:aligrant.com

New Adobe DNG Profiles not showing in Lightroom

Alastair Grant | Wednesday 31 August 2022

I've recently changed my mobile phone to one that supports RAW photos, I also have a ColorChecker so I can create custom camera profiles, and seeing that the RAW photos in Lightroom were lacklustre I went about creating a new profile using Adobe's DNG Profile Editor.   I've done this many times before successfully, but I was unable to get Lightroom or ACR to show me the profile when trying to switch.

In the end I resorted to dcpTool to try and see what was going on.  With this you can decompile a *.dcp file created by the profile editor and see the XML details it contains.  It all looked as expected, but some rummaging around found the problem is with the UniqueCameraModelRestriction tag - while my profile's tag matched the content found in a DNG file's embedded colour profile, it still wasn't showing.

I was lucky and Adobe has recently added official profiles, and I could find them by searching in %PROGRAMFILES%\Adobe\CameraRaw.  When I decompiled these with dcpTool, I found the tag had a slightly different, more qualified name.  I updated the XML for my profile and recompiled a new *.dcp file and reimported it into Lightroom and low and behold, it's appeared just fine.

I'm not entirely clear why what's listed in the DNG file doesn't match a profile with the same name.  I have read through the XMP meta data for the DNG file and cannot see any of the missing bits of text, so clearly there is something else going on here to get the unique camera model that is not obvious.  What this does mean you're kinda stuffed if Adobe haven't created a reference profile to work from.

dcpTool steps

  1. dcpTool.exe -d <adobe's profile>.dcp
  2. Take note of the UniqueCameraModelRestriction value
  3. dcpTool.exe -d <your profile>.dcp <temp file>.xml
  4. Edit <temp file>.xml and update the UniqueCameraModelRestriction tag near the bottom with the correct one from step 2
  5. dcpTool.exe -c <new profile>.dcp <temp file>.xml
  6. Import the new DCP file into Lightroom in the usual manner

Replace the values in tags with their appropriate values.

Breaking from the voyeuristic norms of the Internet, any comments can be made in private by contacting me.