Sony color emphasis issues and successes

Playing around with the new color emphasis mode on the NEX:

These two turned out great
Angel with red heart:
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Thumb tacks, blue:
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However the rest turned out poor.

Thumb tacks, green:
_DSC6863.JPG
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I don't know why the yellow bled through.

Thumb tacks, yellow:
_DSC6865.JPG
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Thumb tacks, red:
_DSC6867.JPG
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My thoughts on this mode so far are thus:

1- It is a fun toy. I don't plan on shooting a lot like this, but nice to have the option.

2- Stuck in Auto mode. When shooting in the color emphasis mode you are stuck with what settings the camera sets.

3- Hard to get a great shot. For some reason the NEX seems to only pic up the color if it is parallel with the camera. Any kind of curve or color variance, and it does not know what to do with it.

Overall this is a great addition, but one that due to its limitations I will only use rarely.
 
Canon compacts with this feature have the same issue. When you select the colour to isolate it only has a small tolerance for exposure, so isolating a shade of blue doesn't guarantee that it will also isolate blues that are significantly lighter or darker. It also gets confused with colours that are combinations of other colours, which I think would explain the green/yellow issue you had.

As an example of the complexity of isolating a colour with non-uniform exposure, this shot below uses selective colour in Nik Silver Efex, but still required about a dozen control points to ensure that all shades of red were isolated.

View attachment 38337
 
previous canon

Canon compacts with this feature have the same issue. When you select the colour to isolate it only has a small tolerance for exposure, so isolating a shade of blue doesn't guarantee that it will also isolate blues that are significantly lighter or darker. It also gets confused with colours that are combinations of other colours, which I think would explain the green/yellow issue you had.

As an example of the complexity of isolating a colour with non-uniform exposure, this shot below uses selective colour in Nik Silver Efex, but still required about a dozen control points to ensure that all shades of red were isolated.

View attachment 38338


I remember the canon I owned previously also had this. The nice difference was that you picked the color you wanted were as with the NEX, you have preset colors.
 
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