purple iris

[cre8ing]

i was taking pictures of flowers today and surprised to see the purple iris comes out blue. Is there any way to get truer colors out of the M8. I will be using it tonight for prom pictures today and my son's date is wearing a purple dress. any suggesting would be helpful.

[luigi bertolotti]

Don't forget the UVIR filter and... beware to set correct WB... what is the firmware release of your M8 ? Prior to the last (1,201) the AWB function was something vary.

[cre8ing]

I have the filter and with the camera set as lens and uv/ir on. Also i reloaded the latest firmware (1.201) to see if it made any difference. No, change.
Thank you for your response i really appreciate it. I guess my only option is lightroom

[vanhulsenbeek]

Originally Posted by cre8ing

I have the filter and with the camera set as lens and uv/ir on. Also i reloaded the latest firmware (1.201) to see if it made any difference. No, change.
Thank you for your response i really appreciate it. I guess my only option is lightroom

Some flowers have notoriously difficult colors. And if we think this is a typical bane from the digital era; it isn't! I remember my first Leica, a CL in 1974 with the famous Summicron C-40mm and taking some pictures of flowers in the garden: a shock, terrible.

This offers no relief to you, I know, and the only think to do indeed is experiment in LR of CS with the white balance and or the blue and red channels. You should realize that on a sunny day in the shade, or in a cloud's shadow, the light is very blue and you should tweak the white balance accordingly.

[mjh]

Purple is a notoriously tricky color to capture, for any camera. If it isn’t actually a mixture of red and blue, but a pure purple, only the blue-sensitive pixels will see it. How could the camera tell it apart from blue? Fortunately, the green-sensitive pixels also retain some sensitivity for blue, so blue plus some green is actually blue while blue and no green suggests purple. Still, there are usually some shades of purple that cannot be reproduced correctly.

[stunsworth]

Bluebells were notoriously difficult to photograph in the days of film due to the fact that the light they reflected differed from that that the eye was sensitive too. I expect there's something similar at play here.

[jaapv]

We are so obsessed by "correct" and "neutral" colour balance in this digital age, that we tend to forget this:

[cre8ing]

Thank you for all your responses. Thank goodness her dress wasn't really purple but a slate color, either that or i could be one of the few color blind ladies

[BerndReini]

Depending on which Raw converter you are using you will have to tweak the reds somewhat. I notice lips go purple a lot, so in lightroom, the first thing I adjust is the red hue to +26. See what that does to the purples.

[ho_co]

Jaap--What, no Agfachrome?


cre8ing--
I'm sure I'm telling you something you're already aware of here, but in case not:

Remember that M8 JPGs have a different color palette from M8 raw files; that all JPGs have a more limited 8-bit color space than RAWs; and that your choice of Adobe RGB vs sRGB will make a difference.


But those points are of minimal importance for the purple iris. As others have said, purple is extremely difficult if not impossible to capture in camera. We're lucky to have the post-processing tools we do, because with film there was virtually no solution.

[jaapv]

It is from John Hedgecoe, "the Photographer's Handbook" 1975 if memory serves. don't think Agfachrome was even available in the UK then, certainly not popular.

[wattsy]

Originally Posted by jaapv

We are so obsessed by "correct" and "neutral" colour balance in this digital age, that we tend to forget this:

Maybe, but the simple truth is that most modern (and many less modern) film emulsions do produce more pleasing skin tones than you get with digital capture. The M8 is particularly poor in this respect and often requires a fair bit of post production to get skin tones looking reasonably good.

[cre8ing]

ho_co
I do shot DNG most of the time. Out of curiosity what is the difference between adobe RGB vs sRBG. I know or at least i think i know the sRGB has more color range. Also which should i use?

[grober]

Ditto the importance of firmware 1.2. Before this current stuff, color balance was very dicey with the M8. Now with the newest firmware, I can begin to enjoy the device. (Only took Leica a year and a half to get it right.)

Jaap: you are a real memory-jogger with those old examples! During summers in secondary school, I hung film at a photo lab in the Chicago area. I can still remember the young German woman in her lab coat who would come down from her lab several times a night to check one thing or another on the Perutz line. All Perutz slide film came to us via the U. S. mail. All Kodachrome went out to the Kodak lab located in Aurora, Illinois (in those days.)

-g

[elviskennedy]

I think I miss those early 70's hairdos more than I miss Kodachrome!

[mjh]

Originally Posted by cre8ing

Out of curiosity what is the difference between adobe RGB vs sRBG. I know or at least i think i know the sRGB has more color range. Also which should i use?

“RGB” is the generic term, referring to just any way of describing colour as a mixture of red, green, and blue. What colour a given RGB triple refers to is essentially undefined, and to give it a specific meaning, a colour space needs to be specified. sRGB and Adobe RGB are two such colour spaces. sRGB is the smaller of the two in that it has a smaller gamut; there are colours that are in Adobe RGB but not in sRGB. While sRGB is based on the colours a CRT monitor can reproduce, Adobe RGB contains some colours available with CMYK printing, which is why it is preferred in the publishing world.

This might be taken to imply that Adobe RGB with its bigger gamut should be preferred, but it isn’t quite as simple. Regardless of the colour space, a pixel can have 2^24 or 16,777,216 possible colours. When the colour space has a bigger gamut, these values are stretched further apart within the colour plane, i.e. the resolution of the different colours is not as smooth. When it turns out that the additional colours gained by choosing Adobe RGB cannot be reproduced by the output device anyway, the colour rendition is actually worse than it would have been had sRGB been used. Furthermore, your software and hardware will assume sRGB by default and images in AdobeRGB may not be reproduced accurately when the profile indicating the colour space is either missing or is ignored – notably some browsers are not profile-aware and will treat Adobe RGB as if it was sRGB.

For these reasons, I would recommend to use sRGB when in doubt, but to switch to Adobe RGB when required by your customer. If you are shooting in raw mode, it doesn’t matter anyway, as you can still decide on the colour space to be used in the raw converter.

[ho_co]

Michael--
Thank you for stepping in on that one! Very complete and concise as usual! (And with more knowledge than I've got. )


cre8ting--
You can always go with Michael's suggestions. He has a great depth of technical understanding and can express it for us lay people. He has written or assisted on a number of LFI articles that are very important to the understanding of the M8's technical abilities and quirks. And you can see above that his English is as good as his German!



One point more: Michael points out that using a larger color gamut than the output device can handle can be detrimental to the image. Printers are improving in this aspect. For example, at least one of the latest 13x19 in (Super B) HP printers now supports 16-bit output on the Mac OS. (I'm unaffiliated with HP, and I'm sure that Canon and Epson have or will soon have the same capability.)

[ho_co]

Originally Posted by elviskennedy

I think I miss those early 70's hairdos more than I miss Kodachrome!

Elvis--and perhaps the ladies of the early '70s?

[cre8ing]

Michael and Ho_Co
So sRBG it is.

Thank you guys, i usually don't like to ask question on the forum in fear of sounding dumb but you guys are great and always willing to help.

And Michael's english is great much better then mine and i was born here. :cool

[graeme_clarke]

Originally Posted by jaapv

It is from John Hedgecoe, "the Photographer's Handbook" 1975 if memory serves. don't think Agfachrome was even available in the UK then, certainly not popular.

Jaap - I remember using Agfachrome 50 in 1961, as well as Kodakchrome 25 and Ferraniacolour 50, all on a school trip to Rome. Agfa was very blue and of the three most prone to overexposure (no light meters in those days, just a little "dial in the conditions" contraption), Ferrania very warm, Kodak just right - I remember it well....


Graeme