How do reds come out in your 5d3 ?

DominoDude said:
Sorry that I'm not of much help regarding the colours on the 5D Mk III and what it looks like in Lr, but from a tip that I've gotten regarding histograms and the jpg you can see on the screen of your cameras, it will be easier to see the correct balance between colours with a Picture Style set to Faithful (or Neutral).

I have no idea if Lr ignores that extra layer of information from the Picture Style while rendering files from RAW, or if gets to be some kind of starting point for the balance of colours in Lr.

If this doesn't apply to you and your shooting, then just ignore my mumbling...
DominoDude - FYI, Neutral is best unless you're under studio lights as Faithful is designed for 5200K lighting, according the Canon's manuals...and LR uses it's own profiles, but DPP uses the Canon ones, needless to say...
 
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lexptr

Photograph the nature while it exists...
Aug 8, 2014
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This exact problem with reds was shocked me when I first time started to use DSLR. Terrible overexposed reds when photographed in a sunny day. It helped to use compensation, but then the image was generally underexposed. I used jpegs those days, but after I tried to shoot jpeg+raw, I figured out, that while jpegs are bad-red, raws had no problem. I didn't dig too much, just stopped to use in-camera jpeg. Anyway I get better results via importing raws in Lightroom.
 
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jrista said:
K-amps said:
Thank you all, especially Jon and McG.

Nice shot Mrs.... only that on my monitor, the flower shows as a deep burnt orange, not red ;D

Same here. That looks like a some kind of Poppy, and they are usually more orange than red.
+1 - I'm on my nice calibrated monitor now, and while I agree mostly, it's very much red in the center and orange on the outer petals. It's a beautiful flower.
 
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mackguyver said:
I can't help you with the science of it all, but I wouldn't recommend filters with digital. Canon's sensors tend to be slightly biased toward saturated reds and the way I shoot flowers is to make sure I'm in the RGB Histogram mode for image review. If I see clipping in any of the channels, particularly on the shadow side, I will increase or reduce the exposure compensation to get a good exposure. In post, the single best tool I've found to process flower photos is DxO. It has a "Protect Saturated Colors" tool (see #4 towards the bottom of this tutorial page) specifically for this situation. The auto mode is a little too aggressive, but the slider works extremely well. You can do similar things in PS/LR with ACR, but it's not as simple. DxO's tool makes it so easy.

+1 for DxO's quality handling of oversaturated colors.

I would like to give you 4 comparisons between the "original raw" (whatever that means) and the changed colors.

Image 1: RAW untouched by DxO

Image 2: RAW corrected with the "Protect Saturated Colors"-slider - automatically determined by DxO

Image 3: RAW corrected manually by sliding the color temperature from approx. 5200K -> 3200K (This destroys the afternoon light in the green vegetation.) Have seen that I used a similar setting with DPP 2 years ago - 5200K -> 3800K

Image 4: RAW corrected manually by changing the color temperature from 5200K -> 4200K to preserve the "afternoon cast" but reduced the max. intensity of the reds (right toolbar, graph below)

Image 2-4 show good color reproduction on my monitor (non calibrated EIZO S2100) and this species of poppies is almost RED!
 

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Jan 29, 2011
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Jim Saunders gave far and away the most important advice in the first answer on the thread, camera calibration is the key to troublesome colours.

Take a couple of minutes to do that and even the most difficult colours are just a click away. Different RAW converters are just using different calibration profiles, none of which are as accurate as a custom one.
 
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nvsravank

CR Pro
Feb 2, 2012
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Reds are the first color that gets saturated. Try taking the photo of a red rose and you will understand what i am saying. The best thing that i like to do is to actually underexpose the photo by a stop or two and combine it with a regularly exposed photo and do a bit of HDR magic to get it to look real life.
This gets some of the texture back into the photo without making the photo look dull with a very dull red.

This might be hard to do in your example since the red most probably are all clipping out.
 
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It's not that Canon sensors can't handle red. It's that sRGB can't handle intense colors and even the simple red rose is far behind sRGB. All the stuff about Canon sensors can't handle red or digital cameras can't handle red is nothing but old wives tales.

I tried to spread the gospel of wide gamut, but always end up with a gang of Luddites slamming me and telling me that wide gamut is just marketing nonsense and everyone knows you have to use sRGB or can only post in sRGB etc. etc.

But it's 95% of the time 99% of the time simply a gamut clipping issue. Many flowers, certain clouds bands and parts of sunsets, some fall foliage, some tropical waters, some emeralds and other such gems, some parts of the plumage on some birds, some really bright clothing and cars, etc. is simply too intense for sRGB gamut.
 
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K-amps said:
Tks guys for the responses.

Jon, I did try the per channel red.... but it did not fix the issue, just washed out the red. In real life the flower has more red chroma, and I can match it on screen, but then all details are washed out.... it's not that easy of a fix... moreover I'd like a perm fix rather than spending hours everytime I shoot red.

The only perm solution is to buy the widest gamut monitor you can find, run it in native gamut (NOT AdobeRGB, although even this would do you much better for reds (recall that the max 2D plot slice that makes it appear to have the same reds as sRGB gives a false impression, look at the full 3D gamut) but why clip off what the monitor can do since it can do more blue-greens, more purples, more reds and oranges than AdobeRGB) mode, and edit photo in ProphotoRGB 16bits. Even then some clipping will occur, but it will definitely be less than viewing in sRGB conditions.

Problems like these are why the display industry has set a hoped for target of no more small gamut displays after 2018, they want everything to be ultra wide gamut after that.
 
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FEBS said:
rs said:
It can only write jpegs in those colour spaces. Raw files are taken and stored with the only colour space constraints being that of the sensor itself. The raw converter will then apply a colour space which may or may not introduce further gamut restrictions.
OK, thx.

I didn't realize that the raw file is not according a colour space. However strange that Canon places a _ in front of the raw filename, in case you choose for AdobeRGB, while the raw file is independent of the colour space as you mentioned.

The embedded jpg preview in those RAWs is stored in AdobeRGB so it tags on the a_ (also it probably makes it easier to keep the files together if you shot RAW+JPG).
 
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LetTheRightLensIn said:
K-amps said:
Tks guys for the responses.

Jon, I did try the per channel red.... but it did not fix the issue, just washed out the red. In real life the flower has more red chroma, and I can match it on screen, but then all details are washed out.... it's not that easy of a fix... moreover I'd like a perm fix rather than spending hours everytime I shoot red.

The only perm solution is to buy the widest gamut monitor you can find, run it in native gamut (NOT AdobeRGB, although even this would do you much better for reds (recall that the max 2D plot slice that makes it appear to have the same reds as sRGB gives a false impression, look at the full 3D gamut) but why clip off what the monitor can do since it can do more blue-greens, more purples, more reds and oranges than AdobeRGB) mode, and edit photo in ProphotoRGB 16bits. Even then some clipping will occur, but it will definitely be less than viewing in sRGB conditions.

Problems like these are why the display industry has set a hoped for target of no more small gamut displays after 2018, they want everything to be ultra wide gamut after that.

Yeah, I kind of skipped past screen gamut, but my screen does pretty well in that area (I think it's 97% AdobeRGB). I guess it is entirely possible that the reds I'm seeing on my screen still look overly saturated on K-amps screen. It is important to use a properly calibrated screen, and to perform your processing work in the widest gamut possible until you have good reason to convert to a smaller gamut.
 
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I have some shots of flowers and leaves that I saved and posted as ProphotoRGB and when viewed on a regular gamut monitor you see large flat spots of not much detail and some sunset shots where some of the glowing bands just disappear and look blended in with the other cloud bands. Pop back over to wide gamut monitor and the detail in the flowers/leaves and glowing sunset bands are back. Same with even a Pileated Woodpecker. The crest may sometimes lose detail and look flat or fuzzy but pop to wide gamut and it's rich glowing scarlet with full details instead of flat, fuzzy orange-red.

You can bring the details back and stick with sRGB but only by doing some combo of making the area too dim, shifting to the wrong color shade, or undersaturated.
 
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Jan 29, 2011
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LetTheRightLensIn said:
I have some shots of flowers and leaves that I saved and posted as ProphotoRGB and when viewed on a regular gamut monitor you see large flat spots of not much detail and some sunset shots where some of the glowing bands just disappear and look blended in with the other cloud bands. Pop back over to wide gamut monitor and the detail in the flowers/leaves and glowing sunset bands are back. Same with even a Pileated Woodpecker. The crest may sometimes lose detail and look flat or fuzzy but pop to wide gamut and it's rich glowing scarlet with full details instead of flat, fuzzy orange-red.

You can bring the details back and stick with sRGB but only by doing some combo of making the area too dim, shifting to the wrong color shade, or undersaturated.
You need to change your rendering intent from Absolute Colormetric to Perceptual or Relative Colormetric to avoid that.
 
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mackguyver said:
jrista said:
K-amps said:
Thank you all, especially Jon and McG.

Nice shot Mrs.... only that on my monitor, the flower shows as a deep burnt orange, not red ;D

Same here. That looks like a some kind of Poppy, and they are usually more orange than red.
+1 - I'm on my nice calibrated monitor now, and while I agree mostly, it's very much red in the center and orange on the outer petals. It's a beautiful flower.

risc32 said:
it's orange here on my crappy monitor, nice shot though.

Of course all of you are correct - it's a deep orange, not red - a good representation of the actual color of the flower, but then it was also shot with a NEX-6 so yeah, it may not be such a good example of 5DMkIII reds ;D

Thanks for all the nice comments by the way - I feel like I'm floating on flowers ;)
 
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privatebydesign said:
LetTheRightLensIn said:
I have some shots of flowers and leaves that I saved and posted as ProphotoRGB and when viewed on a regular gamut monitor you see large flat spots of not much detail and some sunset shots where some of the glowing bands just disappear and look blended in with the other cloud bands. Pop back over to wide gamut monitor and the detail in the flowers/leaves and glowing sunset bands are back. Same with even a Pileated Woodpecker. The crest may sometimes lose detail and look flat or fuzzy but pop to wide gamut and it's rich glowing scarlet with full details instead of flat, fuzzy orange-red.

You can bring the details back and stick with sRGB but only by doing some combo of making the area too dim, shifting to the wrong color shade, or undersaturated.
You need to change your rendering intent from Absolute Colormetric to Perceptual or Relative Colormetric to avoid that.

I have it on the default Relative.

The special intents don't seem to do anything unless you tell it to apply sRGB v4 ICC profile, since the v2 ones don't have a cooked in Perceptual, etc.

But that is all besides the point, that doesn't avoid it the last stuff I mentioned, it may prevent loss of detail to varying degrees, but as I said, then you either suffer from too dim, shifted to the wrong color shade or undersaturation.

And I've found that the cooked in Perceptual intent for srgb v4 ICC often does a poor job IMO and looks worse than relative or absolute or mess around with it yourself.
 
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Jan 29, 2011
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But if nothing is capable of reproducing the "original" colours, which is true in very saturated flowers (not the camera or screen or printer ink), then all we can ever hope for is the best realistic interpretation and that has to include the detail, which we can accurately replicate if not the most saturated of the colours. If Perceptual is blocking up you have other issues.

Besides, colour is not as static a concept as we think, besides the "is red to me red to you?" unprovable conundrum, any reproduction is limited by what light is either shining on it, for a print, or out of it for a screen.

Best practice is to shoot with a color checker card and create your own profile, everything else is just guessing and we are notoriously unreliable at that, then post process for detail. It isn't difficult or time consuming, it just takes discipline.
 
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