Using a DFT based Ligand Field treatment (LFDFT) of the electronic structure of Co(II) and Cu(II) porphyrins (CoP and CuP) we analyse the origin of their EPR spectra. From a comparison between theoretical result on Co model clusters (CoP and CoP-ZnP dimer) we conclude that the g-tensor values are very sensitive to the axial coordination which stabilizes a 2 A I ground state in good agreement with experimental data. In contrast, DFT overestimates Cu-ligand covalency, leading to large discrepancy with experiments, and hence the orbital contribution to the computed g-values is too small. Using a numerical adjustment of nuclear charge for Cu, a good agreement between the computed and the experimental g-tensor values is observed. The influence of the DFT functional on the calculated g-tensor is also discussed. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.