How color profiles & recipes work

A recipe is one Color Profile or Monochrome Profile plus the supporting settings that go with it — tone, white balance, and a few others. Load it into the camera and every JPEG comes out with that look, straight out of camera, no editing.

The camera keeps profiles in numbered slots and can bundle a whole camera setup — including a profile — into a Custom Mode you switch to like a film stock.

The wheel is the heart of a color recipe. It splits the spectrum into twelve hue bands — yellow, orange, orange-red, red, magenta, violet, blue, blue-cyan, cyan, green-cyan, green, and yellow-green. For each band you can change two things:

Saturation

How intense that band of color is. Pull red’s saturation down and red objects go muted; push it up and they get vivid. This is what gives many recipes their character — for example dropping greens and lifting warm tones for an autumnal look.

Hue shift

Nudges that band around the wheel toward its neighbours — pushing cyan toward blue, or yellow toward green — so skies, foliage and skin tones lean a particular direction.

On this site the wheel is drawn as a ring; the further a band’s marker sits from the centre, the more saturated it is.

Highlight & Shadow Control is a three-handle tone curve: separate adjustments for highlights, mid-tones and shadows. Lower the highlights and raise the shadows for a flatter, filmic roll-off; do the opposite for punch.

Contrast and Sharpness are overall sliders on top of that. Gradation is the camera’s auto-tone mode (Normal, or one of the auto/high-key/low-key options).

White balance sets the overall warmth of the image — a preset (Daylight, Shade, and so on) or a specific Kelvin value — plus a two-axis shift: amber–blue and green–magenta. A recipe often leans on a deliberate white-balance choice for its mood.

Monochrome profiles live in their own slots and swap the color wheel for black-and-white controls:

• Color filter effect — simulates a coloured lens filter, lightening its own colour and darkening the opposite (a yellow or red filter darkens blue skies).
• Toning — a tint across the image, such as sepia or a cool blue, at an adjustable strength.
• Film grain — adds low, medium or high grain texture.
• Shading / vignette — darkens the frame edges.

The tone curve, contrast, sharpness and white balance work the same as for color.

Color / Mono profile slots

Four colour (Color 1–4) and four monochrome (Mono 1–4) editable slots, reached with the Creative Dial. This is where the actual recipe values live.

Custom Modes (C1–C5)

Snapshots of the entire camera setup — exposure settings, AF options, and the current profile — that you recall from the mode dial. Storing a recipe to a Custom Mode is what lets you flip between looks quickly. Each Custom Mode carries its own copy of all eight profile slots.

Picture Mode

The older, simpler list (Natural, Vivid, Portrait, Mono, and so on). Color and Monochrome Profiles are the more capable system that replaced it for recipe work.

• From a JPG — fastest; OM Workspace copies every value for you over USB.
• By hand on the OM-3 — no computer needed; you type the values in.
• In OM Workspace (.OES) — applies the look to raw files on your computer rather than the camera.