Luminous Landscape Forum

Equipment & Techniques => Medium Format / Film / Digital Backs – and Large Sensor Photography => Topic started by: Boris_Epix on April 13, 2008, 01:43:52 am

Title: Why does MFDB color suck so bad?
Post by: Boris_Epix on April 13, 2008, 01:43:52 am
Please read / respond in this thread:

http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index....showtopic=24674 (http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=24674)

This is a duplicate caused by a user or system error :-)




Cheers
Boris
Title: Why does MFDB color suck so bad?
Post by: michael on April 13, 2008, 08:09:39 am
Your attachments don't work, so it's hard to know what you're seeing.

But, working with raw files requires work. If you want "nice" picks right out of the camera then simply use your wife's Fuji P&S and let someone else (an engineer in Japan) make the colour balance decisions for you.

Colour is subjective. Today's digital backs do a highly accurate job of recording colours (just shoot a Macbeth Colorchecker chart and neutralize on the second to lightest gray square). I think you'll find nothing much to complain about. But producing pleasing colour is something else.

As for movies that you mention, there has been extensive colour grading (post production colour adjustment) made to every second of that film (digital) recoding.

Red One produces stunning images because it shoots raw, but someone has to adjust those colours just the way that you do with your stills. The film you used to shoot took good colour images (sometimes) because an engineer in Rochester or Tokyo made some decisions about how it would record colour, just as you now need to do with your raw files.

My suggestion is that you shoot some scenes that are typical of your normal subject matter and lighting conditions. Include a Macbeth chart, neutralize on the light gray patch, and then spend some time seasoning the image to taste. Use a raw processing program that allows you to record presets and then save these settings. Next time load those files and click you preset, if you don't want to work on each image separately.

It all really isn't that hard, but don't expect a professional tool to give you the convenience of a consumer product.

Michael
Title: Why does MFDB color suck so bad?
Post by: Boris_Epix on April 13, 2008, 09:00:20 am
Michael,

thanks for your reply. Strange that the pics suddenly stopped working. They used to work when I uploaded them and some people have commented them so I assume they have seen them too. Anyway... I uploaded them again. Hope they work now for you.

I started to shoot digital with the original Canon 1Ds. I have converted many thousand RAW files in the process/years. I've shot color charts, had custom profiles created and all. Still it eats up far too much time and work to get . And the RAW files require mostly localized adjustment and it's always an exercise to get a balance between skin-color and the background. Redishness, venes, etc all is picked up by the possibly "over-accurate" color reproduction capability. With film this was (depending on the film) not a problem at all.

I have read about a patent a couple days ago that was talking about identifying skin colors and selectively/automatically optimize them. Now that would be nice if also MFDB's had efforts being taken in such directions.

I understand that your landscape work requires a completely different toolset and you can probably spend more time on FIXING color and contrast in an individual file. But if you have a fashion/people/lifestyle/catalog client that wants to do the editing (file selection) himself and doesn't give you time to finetune all 1500 frames you shot that day will be very disappointed when he sees the color.

I'm not sure if you're right that a professional tool needs to create more work than a consumer grade product. In my opinion the professional product should get you beyond the possiblities of the consumer grade product and allow to perform further  optimization from there.

Think about a hammer for weekend-DIY people compared to a commercial nail gun.

I want to concentrate on the shoot, set, models and later retouching and not getting the color where it should have been to start with.

Have you seen the latest Nikon software? It allows to define local tuning of the RAW file with the NIK u-point or something technology. Very nice idea and gives you a lotta control.

But with film I never need that :-)

Cheers
Boris

PS: I don't know why this thread shows up twice. Maybe you can consolidate it with this one? Thanks.
http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index....showtopic=24674 (http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=24674)