Samuli Vahonen Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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navmannz wrote:
my assessment is that my A7R has greater sensitivity to yellow-greens than its OM-D predecessor. I've turned down the green and yellow saturation in my LR preset by 10 units, and when processing shots with lots of foliage (particularly in shade) will sometimes decrease it even further.
As 90% of my scenes subjects are green my major headache have been the weird way how Lighroom (+Apple Aperture and Sony's own software and to lesser extend CaptureOne) twist hues of green by turning hue to yellow with brighter greens, in case when middle bright green is adjusted to correct hue. These issues are same with A7 and A7r (and lesser extend with A850), from Canon 5DmkII images there are other issues, but this issue is not there.
I did fight with the issue for quite some time and people here on FM and everywhere else complained about my greens and told that my photos lack something which I had there with Canon 5DmkII (and naturally I wasn't happy about them either). I tried all methods available to fix the greens, which is not much because LightRoom has dropped off ICC-support in favor of simplified and less accurate "capture device profiles" (I can could create 100x more accurate ICC profiles than this crappy "camera profiling" method Adobe is offering):
A. use WB and yellow&hue tint shifts to get green right
B. created profile on shooting location at shooting light using ColorChecker
A didn't work because both adjustments make overall adjustments to hue, and the error is that Sony profile given to Adobe is faulty (and since it happens with their own software as well this really smells Sony generated issue), and naturally tweaking these will affect whole scene not just the hue shifted greens
B doesn't work because ColorChecker has so little number of patches, that it will find you correct "middle bright green", but can't fix the hue shift issue itself.
All this made no sense to me as I did know all the time that actual RAW-files are without this brightness depending hue shift on greens, because they come out with proper greens from all software which has absolute nothing to do with Sony. By this I mean software, which doesn't have profile (or any other "processing instructions") from Sony, for example Iridient Developer and dcraw.c.
navmannz wrote:
...particularly in shade...
Hmmm, I find LightRoom accurate on mid greens and shadows. Are you using polarizer? If you don't then sky glare is affecting the WB in shadows much more than it does on "non-shadow" part of images, making hue shift toward blue which makes green look way too intense and plastic (into which remedy is to adjust yellow and green saturation to negative values like you have done - at same time ruining greens which are not in shadow...). In nature photos getting rid off sky glare is main reason to use polarizer, and having shadow tint issues should not be surprise if not using polarizer.
navmannz wrote:
Would be interested to know if other's have that experience, e.g., I noticed how saturate the greens are in some of the other images on this page before I got to yours. Of course it could be a color bias in my monitor
Helena's photos above have two issues in my opinion:
1. photos on above post are 0.1-0.4 stop too bright on properly calibrated monitor
2. cannot be 100% sure as Helena haven't added info if she used polarizer, but photos look to have been taken without polarizer (and EXIF shutter speeds seem to indicate this as well)
1 is common issue as people tend to prefer brighter instead of correct, which naturally is hard without having properly calibrated workstation and workflow - Histogram is dangerous tool, it makes people generally make this kind of issues to their photos, both at time of shooting and time of post processing. Colors are usually best when they are correctly exposed without adjusting exposure in post processing. I always try to expose photos so that I don't need to touch any sliders/values in post processing.
2 in my opinion any nature photo lacks depth of colors if shoot without polarizer - one can try to manipulate in post processing, but honestly it just usually makes thing more artificial looking.
I would highly recommend 100% usage of polarizer in nature photos. I only remove it for photos, in which I cannot use hat/hand/whatever to block sun hitting the front lens element, it doesn't matter if sun hits the filter (assuming high quality filter) as long as it doesn't shine inside lens (not always even then, depends on scene and intensity of sun). Or when I take 2nd exposure to get sky correctly because polarizer causes too much saturation to sky / too uneven sky (this is where I'm way too lazy, many of my photos are ruined by having too blue sky because I didn't bother to skrew off the filter and take the 2nd exposure for the sky - or if I did, then I was lazy in post processing and didn't merge the photos - laziness is bad habit...).
navmannz wrote:
Anyone found the same or any solutions?
Due to this issue green hue issue I decided to start finding alternative way of processing images. I found a way suitable for me, but for general population it's not suitable as there is no graphical interface, which seems to be fashionable these days. Also my chosen method requires some programming/scripting skills if you want to process lots of images and efficiently adjust WB and brightness. I actually prefer doing my photo processing from Linux command line instead of this slider stuff in LightRoom and I feel better doing post processing with free open source software, but I'm sure >99% of people don't feel the same way. Of course I can program in few hours user interface with PHP & HTML 5 to have sliders if I would feel that it would give me some benefit.
However I can only process images of narrow dynamic range with my "better" method, and have to come back to LightRoom for "Highlights" and "Shadows" sliders if scene requires their usage; this is due to my chosen method only having adjustments for blackpoint, whitepoint, channel multipliers (quite similar to what people usually refer as White Balance) and brightness - for me less is more... unless it's too much less...
Samuli
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