This was an image shot in Jpeg of my kitchen in mid-morning. The lens was set to f4.0 and the ISO was 6400. Looks pretty clean to me. The focus was on the bottle of cleaner in the left hand third of the frame.
Reader MM, was asking about the color I'm getting from Leica cameras and it made me curious to find out if there was some commonality across the line of modern, L or T mount lens cameras (pretty much the same thing) and, if so, what it might be. I'm not sure I know so I made a bunch of photographs today with a Leica TL2 and a lens that seems to be getting a lot of play in the media recently thanks to our friend, Michael Johnston's new found fascination with the Sigma fp and its companion lens, the Sigma i-Series 45mm f2.8.
It was bright and sunny today and almost everything I shot was with the lens set to an aperture of f5.6 with the camera doing AWB and the ISO determined purely by the machines. My post shooting intervention was my usual routine of opening up shadows a bit, clamping down on highlights just a tad, adding some clarity with the Lightroom clarity slider, adding a bit of saturation (I normally photography on that camera with the saturation turned down by half and then adding to taste after the fact) and then hitting the "export" button with vigor. All my street post production is generally done in Lightroom while my paid work is usually finished in PhotoShop. Believe me, there's no magic in my tail post production routines...
But I'll be darned. The files and the colors do look a bit different. I'll add a bunch of samples and let you smarter VSL visitors tell us what we might be reacting to. May just be the "credit-card-placebo-effect."
What do you think?
"Oh crap! How do I turn the video off?"
7 comments:
I'm not precisely sure what you're asking, but the color seems to vibrate, and more than it would do if I were actually looking at it. It's hard to express exactly, because it looks great, but unlikeable. In the photo of Mellow Johnny's Bike Shop, the lettering on the shirt is so sharp and harsh it almost seems to be printed on the surface of the photo, rather than on the shirt -- as if the guy could ride off and leave the lettering behind. I got a little curious about the red in the Chevrolet. I'm an amateur painter and I tried to match it with acrylics. The closest I could come was a cadmium red dark mixed with a little cadmium red medium, but when spread on a piece of white board, the mix looked softer than the color of the Chevrolet. And I think the difference is either in your photo, or my monitor, but I doubt that the Chevy would look quite like what I'm seeing.
Could be the automatic white balance is doing you no favor. Notice the difference in the color of the Chevy hood when shot from the right vs. when shot from the left. It's the impact of the amount of blue sky reflected in the paint when seen from different angles, yes, but there's also something else different about the overall scene. Maybe having both the white balance and ISO skating around on their own adds up to inconsistency.
As to the lettering on the shirt: that's just odd. It appears the type - except for the P in the word "shop" - doesn't appear to be influenced by the folds of the fabric. Odd.
Too many variables. First of all I'm not sure whether these were shot as JPEG or DNG. Your header photo seems to suggest you were shooting JPEG. If that is the case - all bets are off. I am always puzzled by people saying that a "camera" has a certain "colour". The optical formula, materials and construction of a lens certainly does affect the colour of an image. The camera has a sensor, cover glass, assorted matrix filters, etc. that can affect colour. But ultimately it is how that image is processed in camera that interprets all those factors.
Further, after, the image has been processed in camera there are all the other factors of how it is interpreted by the your processing system (computer, software, monitor, etc.). Then you ask us to evaluate the colour after it has been mangled by Blogger, the browser, the Internet, etc. Too many factors do determine what the camera a contributed.
Also, let's say that the Q2 and the SL have exactly the same sensor, glass and processor. I am willing to bet that the actual firmware in the cameras is different and how can we be sure that they are processing colour the same way?
Back to the point on JPEGs. I have found that ALL the cameras I have used process JPEGS differently to each other. It does not matter whether they are the same brand, series, sensors or anything else. I find it just as true of Leicas as any other brand I have tried.
I know, long tedious answer just to say, "I don't know." But I like your pictures anyway (except the one of the ugly man with the hat wiping his nose on the camera).
They look like colors : ). Really there are so many opionions and different screens and such that it's hard to form an opinion. The blues look like they lean purple, perhaps? I like the yellows. The FP, when you first shot with that, seemed to stand out with good yellows. Maybe it was in part the lens.
I have no opinion on the colors, but I have to say that unequivocally, the Chevy El Camino beats the Ford Ranchero (photogenically speaking) every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
Karmagroovy, Complete Agreement!!!
327 all the way.
As a long-time reader and Fuji shooter (thus an impartial observer), your best colors come from the fp. Every time you do an fp post, I get tempted.
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