Kit Laughlin wrote:
"None of this precludes calibrating your laptop monitor."
What he said, seriously. One cannot even begin to talk about colour without calibration, because your monitor will likely have its own cast. Once calibrated, you can use it anywhere you like.
And by monitor we included laptop displays.
You buy a calibration kit, run the calibration, and apply the profile within the calibration software, and you're done, no need to haul everything around, you could bring the i1Pro(for example) with you for real time ambient light adjustment, but that isn't really required.
After profiling my monitor the first time, I found everything looked odd as the colors were so different, 20 minutes later after I had gotten used to seeing pictures as they should be, everything looks much more natural, I won't go back to un-calibrated viewing, what's funny is seeing how bad TV screens are off, I've tried to have my TV as close to calibrated for a long time, my movie collection looks much better because of it.
I watch Jason Lanier's video on youtube on photography and the following video show the yellow cast on the model's face in nearly all his pics.
This is the color cast I get when I shoot in mixed light indoor. I barely see that with m240. This is so much that indoor nearly all the pics have this cast.
Here is one I took this evening at the showcase of my son's music school with his Piano teacher. Shot with canon FD 85 1.2L, I think wide open. I though I got this right but on laptop I saw the frustrating yellow strips on the face of the teacher. Its indoor lights but ruins the picture.
I'll join in the chorus of people who struggle with colour on the A7 series. I shoot an A7 with Voigtlander, FE, Contax G and Canon FD lenses, and in 2 years I haven't shot an image that I really love. Resulution is defintely higher than my 5D2, dynamic range is orders of magnitude better, though pulling up shadows and pulling highlights down results in ugly, HDR-type images that I don't care for, but I just don't like the look of my A7 photos. And it's definitely colour. I haven't shot Canon in 4 years, so it's not like I'm still conditioned to favour Canon colour. The A7 colours are just kind of ugly. Something also about the transition between colours is wrong. The day that an A7-alike camera comes out from Canon, with at least 24 Mpx and an EVF, I'm in as long as it accepts Leica M lenses. Dynamic range isn't important to me, since I find using it makes for ugly images with current screen/printing technology. Get it right in camera and Canon colours (I've never used a Leica camera) are the best I've seen. It's as if Sony realised that what sells cameras is 100% crops which compare sharpness, and have abandoned any other metric.
Justin D wrote:
...The day that an A7-alike camera comes out from Canon, with at least 24 Mpx and an EVF, I'm in as long as it accepts Leica M lenses. ...
You're ready for the SL. You won't miss the Canon.
I struggled with the A7R and now the A7RII to get the colors I want AS EASILY as I do with my Nikon D800 using ACR. I've put this down to how ACR interprets the RAW files and what default profile that it uses. What I really find annoying is how poor the white balance can be in the RAW files which causes me to work even harder to get the images I want.
I been having problems with shooting in low light lit by tungsten light. Auto WB skin tones seem to be really yellow. Custom WB helps, I haven't had too much time to shoot some portraits outdoors. I hope I'm not disappointed when shooting in day light or shade...Even shooting RAW fixing skin tones it's a bit more difficult than on my Fuji X-T1.
I had the A7r and now Leica M 240. To be honest I don't quite always understand this bashing of Sony colors. I always got them the way I wanted. A7r II is much improved here. Color output is somewhat different from Leica, but it doesn't make it worse. For skin tones I often find Leica slightly better straight out of camera,but nothing what a combination of calibrated monitor and RAW converter can't fix for the Sony. With Leica you often find over saturated red channel (somewhat similar to Canon), so they both have their weaknesses. That over saturated reds sometimes gives me a headache in landscapes.
