[Mikey69]

I was at a recent photoshop seminar and the guest speaker was talking about setting your camera's profile to whatever it is your shooting, being landscapes, portraits, sports or whatever the case may be. He says by doing this when you shoot in RAW, your pictures won't be as dull looking as they normally do. Therefore creating less post processing. Of course he could only refer to the other 2 big camera makers. I looked thru my manual, and for the life of me I can't find where I can do that on my K-5. Anybody out there know what I'm talking about and can help me out? I'm new to the forum, but have been a Pentax owner from the super program film days. Thank-you.

[WightWalker]

The fact that you are using RAW would tend to suggest that, straight out of the camera, the results would be just what the camera saw unless, of course, you use the SilkyPix software which uses some of the JPG settings.

I agree that processing large amounts of RAW files is time consuming but after a while it's surprising how quickly it can be done.

I used to use Pentax's SilkyPix software with my K10.

I now use LightRoom v4.1RC with the K5 to get the best possible results; I have a Preset which sets the Clarity to 20, Noise Reduction to 25, Sharpness to 50 & Lens correction to my 'walk about lens' & then using the Tone Curve to optimise the Histogram & Basic Sliders to set the desired levels - job done.

[Col]

I can only answer from the Lr3/4 point of view. When I obtain a processing I like I click the Plus Sign beside "Presets" on the RHS and select which of the adjustments I want to memorize and then name it something Like DA21 Land Water, and save it under user presets. Thus I can select this preset processing to be applied on a subsequent import from the Develop Settings drop down options.

TBH I tend to import as fast as possible, review all and flag those to delete. After deleting I can process a "typical" shot then copy the processing and back in the library select all the shots I want to apply the same adjustments to and paste them. Depends how varied the day's shooting's been.

[Anvh]

You can set the camera profile in photoshop and lightroom in Adobe Camera Raw, it's under the tab Camera Calibration (strange how much sense that make right?)
With Pentax you only have two options standard; embedded (pentax) and the Adobe profiles.
With Canon you most of the time get several, standard, portrait, landscape are some of them, they are provided by the camera maker.

You can make your own profiles as well.

[Na Horuk]

What I do in lightroom is import a photo, set the camera calibration, noise reduction maybe some other things (minimal changes) and then hit the develop tab at the top left and "Set default settings." then you can set the settings for every camera and ISO. Once you do this, lightroom will automatically apply those changes to all the imported photos taken by that camera and at that ISO. Beyond that I change things per batch or per photo (for the few good ones)
Personally I don't set it to "portrait" or "landscape" but you could make presets for those. These presets would include things like for portraits warmer white balance, lowering clarity and raising sharpness, maybe make the shadows more orangeish, +/- on specific colour saturations. You can find a lot of presets online btw, some are pretty neat, others are a bit cliche or only work for very few shots.

Oh and yes, changing in-camera settings might not have an effect on raw images. You can try this by turning the mode dial to portrait and taking a portrait with dng+jpg and then see the difference between dng and jpg. That difference is basically camera calibration as Pentax sees fit for that camera and that shooting mode.

[Anvh]

Just for the note.
"presets" are not the same as "camera profiles"