skibum5 Online Dedicated FM Upload & Sell: Off
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ejmartin wrote:
keithreeder wrote:
I think this is worth reading in order to keep a sense of perspective: http://www.ojodigital.com/...378-labyrinth-artefacts-green-equilibration.html
Scroll down to the Blue Sky shots and you'll see the mazing just like what has been posted on this thread - green channel imbalance is apparently a common and known occurence in many cameras from many manufacturers (it is regularly discussed on the Raw Therapee forum, and never about the 7D! )
It's so pervasive in fact, that you can't help but wonder if it's designed in...
Much of the non 7D discussion about it indicates that better demosaicing algorithms are the solution. Even Adobe is aware of, and considers that it is able to address, artifacts caused by the imbalance: http://forums.adobe.com/message/2321414?tstart=0
As post 7 there says:
Anyway, this simply indicates that there is a bug in Lightroom/ACR. It should not do this as it can clearly deal with unequal green response, and similar problems were fixed for other cameras with unequal green response.
For clarity, I'm not saying that nothing is going on with the 7D, but I am saying that it appears neither to be unique to the 7D nor - on the face of it - terribly intimidating to providers of conversion software...
I am very familiar with the discussion at OjoDigital; I am the developer of an advanced demosaic algorithm (AMaZE) which should appear in a future release of PerfectRAW being developed there.
The workaround which is suggested there is an averaging of the green channels, with a concomitant loss of resolution, as I have been saying all along. Any such averaging amounts to a low pass filter being applied to the RAW data. The low pass filtering to equilibrate the greens sacrifices resolution for the purpose of preventing artifacting.
It would be much better, if indeed the problem is a manufacturing defect, to know how widespread it is and to get it fixed. That way the full resolution that the camera is capable of can be extracted in principle. If the issue is rather the design of the CFA, then Canon has decided to sacrifice resolution for some purpose yet to be determined.
It would be interesting to see the 3-color vs 4-color test I suggested carried out on a number of cameras to see if the issue is pervasive, and just worse with the 7D, or if it is rather unique to the 7D in Canon's lineup. The one example skibum posted from a 5D2 indicates there is much less green imbalance on that camera.
I will run it on my old 20D/40D/50D files and post back.
My guess is they will show it even a little less than with my 5D2.
It is interesting that in the sample I posted above you can clearly see the darker dots in the DPP conversion lining up in straight maze-like lines even if they mask the effect in the smooth areas somewhat, so it is not like even DPP from Canon actually completely avoids all issues as some earlier talk had suggested.
It seems like it would be a weird decision to go to a 4-color array if it would lead to either some extra noise or some loss of detail when they are bragging about how great the reach and detail are and how low the noise is now.
I will fire off an email to canon tech support too and see what they have to say about it.
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