How to Update Lightroom 6.14 with Lens Profiles After Adobe Has Ceased Support

Now that Adobe has stopped providing updates to standalone Lightroom, you can’t get lens profile updates any more. Here’s a way to sidestep that problem when you get a new lens.

Lens profiles, by the way, let you correct for vignetting, lens distortions like barrel or pincushion, and chromatic aberration. If you aren’t using this feature for your Raw files in Lightroom, you should be. For an extreme example of how useful a lens profile can be, you should read this article

Lightroom has this new lens profile available, courtesy of the DNG Converter

The very same lens profile files that you used to get with Lightroom updates are provided with their still-supported free program called “Adobe DNG Converter”. You can get updates to the DNG Converter program from the Adobe site, at least as of this writing. The latest version of this program (for Windows 10) is in a file named “DNGConverter_12_2.exe”. After installation, a great many lens profiles are installed onto your computer. You also get a special folder created that you’ll need to add files into later.

If you didn’t know, the “DNG” stands for “digital negative” and is Adobe’s attempt to create a generic raw-format file. The format didn’t catch on with the camera industry as well as Adobe had hoped, and today it has limited usefulness.

The lens profile file names have a suffix of “.lcp”. I got a new Nikon-mount “Sigma 14-24 f/2.8 Art” lens, for instance, that Adobe supports in their DNG Converter under the file name:

“NIKON CORPORATION (SIGMA 14-24mm F2.8 DG HSM A018) – RAW.lcp”.

This new lens isn’t supported in my Lightroom 6.14 version, which would normally mean that I could only do “manual” lens profile corrections in Lightroom. The manual lens corrections are really second-rate compared to the Adobe-supplied profiles.

After installing the DNG Converter program, the Nikon-mount Sigma lenses can be found in the folder (in Windows 10 x64) under:

“C:\ProgramData\Adobe\CameraRaw\LensProfiles\1.0\Sigma\Nikon\”.

There are 86 lens profiles just in this one folder alone.

It's possible that you will have trouble finding folders in Windows if they're hidden. You'll need to tell Windows File Explorer to enable display of hidden folders.

To use this lens profile in Lightroom, I just copied the .lcp file from the Camera Raw location to my “Downloaded” folder called:

“C:\Users\Ed\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\CameraRaw\LensProfiles\1.0\Downloaded”.

The path shown above has the “user name” of “Ed” for my machine; I assume yours is different.

A new lens profile should be copied here for Lightroom to find it

After copying the .lcp file(s) into the “Downloaded” folder, you should be able to start up Lightroom and have the new lens profile(s) available. Be aware that this “Downloaded” folder won’t exist if you don’t install the DNG Converter program.

Conclusion

You may not be able to get any new program updates for the standalone version of Lightroom from Adobe any more, but at least this trick will let you update your lens profiles. Let’s hope Adobe will keep updating and offering its DNG Converter program.

Another problem related to the loss of updates is the fact that Adobe will no longer let you download any standalone Lightroom updates beyond version 6.0. If you try installing Lightroom from your DVD (version 6.0) onto a new computer, you’re stuck with version 6.0. I’ll be addressing a fix to this problem in a future article, so stay tuned.