Micro 4/3 Color "Science"

[MFToutdoor]

Interesting read ...
personally used C1 for my Sony RAW and now OM-1 RAW processing.

How Your Camera and Image Processor Determine Colors

Sometimes, people are talking about in-camera JPEGs, and it is possible to have a moderately fruitful discussion. How fruitful it might be depends on the definition of better. If better means more accurate, careful image analysis can yield objective insights. If better means, “what I like”, a meeting of the minds is far less likely.

www.lensrentals.com

 

[John King]

An interesting article, thanks.

And a warm to this friendly forum.

 

[BobT]

Interesting read ...
personally used C1 for my Sony RAW and now OM-1 RAW processing.

How Your Camera and Image Processor Determine Colors

Sometimes, people are talking about in-camera JPEGs, and it is possible to have a moderately fruitful discussion. How fruitful it might be depends on the definition of better. If better means more accurate, careful image analysis can yield objective insights. If better means, “what I like”, a meeting of the minds is far less likely.

www.lensrentals.com

Thanks to this great post, I think I've solved a problem I've had with blown reds out of the OM-1 in particular. I have been shooting with the "Natural" picture mode (profile). I like its greens in particular, however, the reds and yellows are often blown and not easy to correct well in post. "Natural" looks good but it seems to be anything but natural. Below I have four identical uncropped images of a Scarlet Honeyeater. They are processed through Lightroom Classic (LrC) but with nothing done to them except the profile changed. The profiles, in LrC parlance are the OMDS profiles Camera Natural and Camera Muted and the Adobe profiles Adobe Color and Adobe Standard. With birds against the sky I normally apply exposure compensation. In this case I didn't, so the bird is underexposed which is just as well because in the ONDS profiles, the red on the head is well blown. Both OMDS profiles, even the Muted, are considerably more saturated and blown than the Adobe profiles. Clearly, there is more detail in the Adobe Standard albeit rather duller in colour.
I don't feel competent enough to create my own profile, so I'm temped to use Muted in future and if reds and yellows are still blown, I'll switch to the Adobe profiles in LrC and hope detail is recoverable. Anyway, I think this very much highlights the issues mentioned in the post above.

Camera Natural

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Camera Muted

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Adobe Color

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Adobe Standard

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[The Electric Squirrel]

You could also try using the profile you most prefer as a starting point and adjust the individual colours from the HSL-panel in LrC.

Try adjusting both luminance and saturation for the red end of things and see where that gets you.

 

[Ad Dieleman]

Even though I am, in Jim Kasson's words, "color-vision deficient", I have been making my own camera profiles with various programs for every camera I owned since the Panasonic G1. That G1 drove me mad because I couldn't get the colors where I wanted them to be, and I bought an X-rite Colorchecker Chart and made profiles with it, which solved my problem. Every other camera since then didn't even remotely pose the same problem, but I still profiled them to my taste because I could.

I've been trying to understand color and I can only agree with Jim Kasson's statement that it's incredibly complex. Ultimately I'm happy that my camera, raw developer, screen and print lab deliver results I'm comfortable with; once a problem arises, I have to study and experiment again. This is one of the reasons why I don't like to switch cameras or anything else in the image processing chain.

 

[BobT]

You could also try using the profile you most prefer as a starting point and adjust the individual colours from the HSL-panel in LrC.

View attachment 379555

Try adjusting both luminance and saturation for the red end of things and see where that gets you.

That's what I have been doing but it's really touchy. To recover detail the reds often become quite dull. It's hard to get the middle ground right. I'm thinking, starting from a low base like Adobe Standard and working up may be the way to go. Time will tell.

 

[bartjeej]

Interesting read ...
personally used C1 for my Sony RAW and now OM-1 RAW processing.

How Your Camera and Image Processor Determine Colors

Sometimes, people are talking about in-camera JPEGs, and it is possible to have a moderately fruitful discussion. How fruitful it might be depends on the definition of better. If better means more accurate, careful image analysis can yield objective insights. If better means, “what I like”, a meeting of the minds is far less likely.

www.lensrentals.com

Thanks! Very interesting read. I wonder which consumer cameras come closest to true color accuracy. Hasselblad makes a big deal of their natural color, and from what Ming Thein posted about it during his time at Hasselblad, they really do seem to take it seriously. But then their prices put them so far out of reach for me that it's almost a moot point.

@BobT: how do the Olympus profiles in Lightroom compare to Olympus' jpegs? With Fuji at least, there's still a clear difference between the jpegs and the raw files using Adobe's Fuji profile with the same "film sim" name - and often the jpeg is the subtler of the two files, which I tend to prefer as a base for mild edits (larger edits often require the flexibility of the raw file).

Also at concerts I often fail to get anything close to the jpeg out of the raw file when there are blown out haloes around purple stage lights.

Thanks to this great post, I think I've solved a problem I've had with blown reds out of the OM-1 in particular. I have been shooting with the "Natural" picture mode (profile). I like its greens in particular, however, the reds and yellows are often blown and not easy to correct well in post. "Natural" looks good but it seems to be anything but natural. Below I have four identical uncropped images of a Scarlet Honeyeater. They are processed through Lightroom Classic (LrC) but with nothing done to them except the profile changed. Both OMDS profiles, even the Muted, are considerably more saturated and blown than the Adobe profiles. Clearly, there is more detail in the Adobe Standard albeit rather duller in colour.

 

[BobT]

@BobT: how do the Olympus profiles in Lightroom compare to Olympus' jpegs?

I don't shoot jpegs so can't say for sure but I suspect they are a bit better controlled. However, with raws, at least there is a bit of head room to recover detail.