Pentax Profiles - My Ilford HP5
This week it is rumored that Pentax will grace us users with a new Custom Image profile called ‘satobi’, this should be coming in a firmware update 7th Dec (coincidentally my birthday)!
In celebration of that I thought it might be a nice idea to create a page where we can share some of our own Custom Image profiles and what interesting results we have stumbled upon.
I’ll start with my own ‘recipe’ which kinda resembles an Ilford HP5 vibe. Like most things, I discover these little settings in the field, when I get home I like to cross reference to see if anything I came up with resembles something else. In this instance I found my ‘in the field settings’ to match quite closely RNI5’s Ilford HP5 Profile.
Click the images below to expand/enlarge them if you need to.
My Ilford HP5
Here we see the Jpg Profile on the right with zero editing and on the left we have a slight RAW edit with RNI5’s Ilford HP5 Profile applied. Quite a close match I feel.
This time the images are flipped around, we can now see the RAW on the right now showing the RNI Profile and some slight slider changes. The RAW typically needs adjusted (for comparisons) because some of these in camera settings were biased towards what I was seeing in the field (the jpg preview), this particular image suited -2.0EV bias which was fine for the Jpg settings but too dark for the RAW, so in order to compare more easily some adjustments are required.
Here’s another example.
Here again we see on the right the Jpg profile captured at the time, but this time I did need to stray a little off the base exposure as the scene had more dynamic range, Highlights and Shadows being the main things adjusted. On the left we have the RNI5 HP5 Profile again, let’s have a look at the slider changes for this RAW file below…
Ok so pretty much similar adjustments, some Highlights and Shadows mainly, so it’s a pretty good match.
Let’s have a look at one last comparison.
Same as the first example, the image on the right is the SooC (Straight out of Camera) with zero adjustments, the version on the left is the RAW file with RNI’s Ilford HP5 Profile applied. Let’s have a look at the RAW settings…
Ok so not too much fudging, some dynamic range recovery and less contrast. Cool!
So let’s talk about the in camera settings used. First of all we need to mention the light conditions of the day. These shots were taken on an overcast early morning bushwalk, so if you apply these same settings to a different scene such as bright blue sky day or indoors under artificial light then the results may differ greatly.
I chose Cloudy for these conditions.
Next up is of course the Custom Image profile, I used Monochrome of course with the following settings;
No Filter
No Toning
High/Low Key Adj +2
Contrast +3
Highlight Adjustment 0
Shadow Adjustment +1
Fine Sharpness +1
Dynamic Range Settings, Highlight Correction set to On.
Shadow Correction set to Medium.
My metering mode was Center Weighted.
And really that’s it! What you need to remember is to trust your histogram and what you’re seeing on the back of the screen in the field. The idea with these Custom Image Profiles is to get you something out of the box that resembles what you want in post processing, if the Jpg looks good, the RAW will be easier to guide (and often not even needed). So shooting RAW+Jpg is what I recommend.
And one last thing, pay attention to your EV bias, some of my shots here were anywhere between -0.7-2.0 under exposed!
Here’s a few more samples, some of these have only had a couple slider adjustments on the Jpgs (pSooC), others nothing at all (SooC), but they are all the Jpgs not the RAWs.
Let me know what you think in the comments below. Of course we could amplify the vibe more with some further editing, grain etc, but for the purpose of this blog I wanted to demonstrate how close in camera Jpg settings could match some paid for Profile software.
Would you like to see what other Pentax Profiles we can come up with? If you have some of your own then please get in touch with me and we’ll see if we can share those here too!
Thanks for reading.
