Hi — thanks, I’m really glad that part resonated with you.

Short answer: you can improve it with colour profiles, but you can’t fully fix it.

Colour profiles (film simulations, picture controls, presets, LUTs, even calibrating your camera) mainly affect:

overall colour bias and accuracy.

contrast curve

saturation

highlight and shadow roll-off

What they don’t really change is how tones transition into each other — especially in skin, skies and where subtle changes in colour are contained in a scene.

That’s where sensor size, pixel structure, and tonal depth start to matter.

When people talk about “tonal transitions,” they’re usually referring to how gently one shade blends into the next — for example how a cheek moves from highlight to midtone to shadow without looking abrupt or slightly “digital.”

You can absolutely make colours look similar across cameras with profiles, but you can’t make a smaller sensor render tones in the same way as a larger one — particularly under natural light and in skin.

Profiles can narrow the gap, sometimes a lot, but they don’t change the underlying data the sensor captured in the first place — they’re shaping it after the fact.

It’s something I may well explore properly in a separate piece at some point, because it’s one of those things people feel immediately when they see images, but struggle to put into words.

All the best

— David