The Colour Science Myth… (If you shoot RAW)

I thought the term color science was more applicable to JPEG with images processed in camera. If you start with a RAW you demonstrated that you can take a RAW and take it to the same place whatever the camera that captured it (with regard to colours). If you want to use the JPEG output then there is a difference between the brands.

James chose violence today huh 😂

I think a lot of emphasis on color science is more about how little you have to work on them in post to get the colors you want. I have no doubt that any camera's output can get you where you want to go, if you spend time on it. How much time is the question. Personally, I'm glad to prioritize a camera which gets me closer to what I want without having to edit. I'm a hobbyist, and seldom can find time to sit down and edit, mostly because I don't enjoy it. But for someone who is already editing in their workflow, adjusting the colors isn't as big of a hurdle.

I thought I’d mentioned that if you don’t like editing and shoot jpeg, colour science does matter, and will fairly affect your camera choice in that instance. Even if you shoot raw though, colour matching doesn’t need to be time intensive. Doing this across a couple of images will allow you to develop a preset… Thanks for watching!

I'm glad that I only have 1 camera. I couldn't be bothered doing this. Thanks for the video.

This is one of the main reasons why I love my Lumix camera. I can just download LUTs that are designed to be color matched to different brands color science. I have Black Magic, Leica, Fuji, Arri, and others that I can switch between at a moment’s notice.

Colour science is also important for those who do not have the time to edit to a fine detail, SOOC JPEGs that do not have a lot of latitude in post production and video creators that also need to turn things around quickly. I also do have to say that colour science is more important when it comes to capturing accurate skin tones. Some say the Sony goes towards the greens and Lumix toward the reds, so new users to those systems may find they're processing more than they would have previously. It's all subjective of course, a Raw file can be altered in every direction as you have eloquently shown.

Well damn, good morning to you, James

If you're willing to click around in Lightroom for every photo you publish, and you shoot raw, sure, color science doesn't matter. But for someone who likes to publish sooc jpegs, the available profiles, film simulations etc become critical to the experience.

I think this colour "science" everyone is talking about is mostly applicable to video and jpegs, really. You can still colour match those, but the effort may differ depending on how far it is from your desired look. On the Lumix side, I'd say the whole conversation is pasé considering the Real Time LUT feature and a vast library of Fuji-like or Leica-like LUTs (you could try the new L10 maybe? wink wink etc.)

White balance is key. Some cameras are better than others at auto detecting this. Snapping a pic of a grey card makes it easy to calibrate in your editor. But who remembers to do that in the field?

I feel like deep deep purples and violets are hard colors for my cameras to process. They always get crushed. If a camera had a better capture of the color spectrum NOW that would be a selling point to me.

Leica is a Sony sensor. Most new cameras share parts. I think it’s far to say if we want different colours and look out of camera we need to consider age of a camera.

Hi James, the only time i thought of buying another camera for the color science was a couple of weeks ago editing some pictures i took inside a church shooting a wedding. The lighting was horrendous, the walls were orange and the marble was dark and blueish. I tried my best to recover the skin tones and after 4 hours of intense work i got kinda close getting 50ish decent photos. I thought that a camera with better color science than my a7IV would've given me better skin tones, I thought maybe a canon might be better. I honestly dont know if this is true, all high end cameras i've used are sony, so im biased to think that bad photos are my camera's fault (which most likely isnt true). Could you try something like this to see if some camera brands allow you to recover colors more than others? Like in concerts, red and purple lights can be turned into normal skin tones by adjusting WB, colors and calibration in lightroom with patience and skill. I think the real question is, which camera allows me to recover more color, detail or push my edit further before breaking. Would you agree?

Wait, SL3, when did that happen? I've been gone for like a week...

It’s not nonsense, it’s that with each brand you CAN land in the same general place but you have to push each file in distinct ways to get there. It’s about the starting point. For some it’s just less intuitive to get a good result. If you’ve shot canon for a couple decades, the heavy blue lean vs red in Sony can be a thing to deal with when you’re trying to create balanced files. Outdoor scenes are also really less picky about color accuracy. It’s more once you’re at the product level in my experience where exact color really shows its head. What matters most tends to be bit depth in the raws and how capture one interprets that data. I mostly mention color science when it comes to the software because there is a difference between Lightroom and c1. And sure you could get similar results but capture one, again, gets you there faster. And that matters

I agree for raw files but the strenght of Fuji is their jpeg file + their "film" preset. I guess we can talk of colour science when we are looking for jepg file extract from the camera without any additionnal modification from our side.

Well Adobe's color profile aims to make the files as similar as possible. So that is what you can see it achieve

If you used DxO Photolab, you can start from a calibrated neutral starting point, as DxO measure each sensor and its response. Alternatively, you can render any raw file to match any other sensors output.

0:50 - GAS ADDICT.