Originally posted by ndevlin 
Just use the Standalone. It works fine. However, I am less than certain about the product. My dead-flat overcast profile adds a lot of colour saturation, but perhaps more than is accurate, and my attempts at profiles in studio lighting have yielded awful results. Is anyone having luck producing *really* good profiles?
Btw - Adobe Standard V1 in LR and ACR is crap. They have updated it - I believe that's now public. V2 is much better.
- N.
I don't own the Z, but I have had the experience of creating some bad profiles in the past in the studio with the color checker. The single most important thing is to make sure you have spot-on exposure. I am a religious user of a Sekonic 758, but for this particular application, I would recommend a high quality gray card. Here's what I do:
Set up your studio lights, but make sure you have even illumination from side to side, and top to bottom. I use a massive 4'x6' softbox to illuminate my little color checker, it's almost comical. Then, set up an easel or something to hold your gray card and color checker. Take a test shot of the gray card, and check the histogram, and adjust your aperture/iso until the gray spike is absolutely dead center. I go so far as to switch out of my default 1/2 stop increments to 1/3 stop (if it gets me closer), and even reposition the light until that spike is as centered as possible. Then I take my profile shot of the color checker. Using the gray card in the position of the color checker eliminates any possible operator error with the light meter, or difference between theoretical f-stops, and effective T-stops of the lens.
Another explanation for what you might be seeing is that it's a psycho-visual phenomenon called retinal fatigue. Think about if you've ever worn a pair of amber sunglasses for a while, and then taken them off, and everything looks blue. A similar thing happens when you are looking at an image, and then say... change the color profile. Even though, as you rightly point out, Adobe Standard is crap, if that's the default profile that gets applied to your photos on import, your brain may 'accept as true' those colors, and when you switch to the color checker profile, your brain may believe that it's too colorful. Or not. It very well may be too colorful.
The best way to judge it is to apply the color-checker-created profile, and then walk away from your monitor for about 5 minutes, come back and look again. It's also helpful to hold the physical color checker next to an image that contains a shot of the color checker, perhaps in the context of a real world scene, or say studio headshot of the subject holding the target.
Hope there is some food for thought in there. (I realize that this whole explanation is like the freshman trying to lecture the PhD)
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