So why profile your camera? That's actually a pretty simple question to answer. Each camera is unique. Most camera manufacturers attempt to apply some sort of correction set to the files their cameras create. Unfortunately they apply the same corrections to every camera so it is not a very good solution. Frequently the files that are created need a great deal of adjustment to be accurate. The two examples shown here illustrate the point pretty well. Figure 1 is a raw file from a Phase One H20 camera and figure 2 is the same file with profiles applied. You can see there are differences between the raw and profiled files. Every camera is unique. By building a custom profile you can compensate for the errors in your camera's color vision. In the end what this means is less work for you.
So how does this work?To be very basic about this, when you shoot your Coloreyes target and create a profile using ColorEyes software three things happen. First the software looks at each patch and measures the color the camera saw. Next the software calculates the difference between what the camera saw and what the reference file says the color is supposed to be. Third the software builds the profile which is actually a set of corrections to make the camera "see" more accurately.
