K-5II camera profile

I notice that the colours produced by the embedded camera profile for the K-5II/IIs seem to be much the same as for the original K-5. This is a shame as there was room for improvement IMO. I guess it's difficult as people get to accept what they're used to.

Here's an example of the out of camera JPEG and that post processed using a custom camera profile derived using a QPcard203. Deeply saturated flowers with colours outside the sRGB gamut are a harsh test but the custom camera profile produces colours which are much truer to the orange amaryllis than that obtained using the embedded profile. It's not a precise like-for-like test as the tone curves will be different and lens correction is applied to post processed image, but I think it's reasonably fair.

Interesting. How does this compare with custom setting colours in-camera, and/or in LR?

Camera manufacturers are trying to give a result that will be pleasing to the majority. What is pleasing to you is not necessarily what is pleasing to your neighbour. That's why there are so many different applications for post processing. On top of that, the processing power of a camera is not the same as a full size computer.

What do the results look like for the different JPG options?

I'm using the 'Neutral' JPEG setting with no adjustments and set to sRGB colour space.

If I select the 'Embedded' profile in Adobe Camera Raw I get similar results to those from the in camera JPEG, which is what you'd expect. I think this indicates the colour difference is due to the profile, rather than processing power, although I suppose the profile could be a simplified model to minimise processor demands.

I don't have an Adobe profile for the K-5IIs, I don't know if one has been produced yet. I'm not sure it would be any good - the one I have for the K-5 is pretty awful.

What I haven't tried is setting the camera JPEG colour space to AdobeRGB. I wonder whether this would change the profile embedded in the Raw file and improve it. I make my custom profiles for ProPhotoRGB but I'd make different ones for AdobeRGB and sRGB in order to soft clip out of gamut colours - I wonder if Pentax do the same.

I found the Huelight profile sets to be good in LR4 and CS6. http://www.colorfidelity.com