Skin tones with the M-P240

[SilentShutter]

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Can you maybe post a sample of one of your portraits which make you so frustrated ?

I know it won´t help but skin tones are almost not perfect out-of-camera and the most

are "modified" in post-production-process later........

[LocalHero1953]

Are you guys correcting for screens or prints?  If for screens other than your own, I'd say that would be impossible - they're all different.  You can have no control over that.

 

For print, after a couple of tests easy to get right.  I use the Cap1 & full Photoshop

I'm not sure what you mean. Whether you make corrections or not, different screens may show different colours. But you still want images you produce to look as well as possible on other monitors, calibrated or not, so there are good reasons for making corrections on photos only for digital display.

My system is calibrated so that my prints have the same colours as the screen, within the limits of the particular paper.

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[bencoyote]

No, I use the Colorchecker to make a profile. I have a whole series by now of different types of light. If I cannot get the skintone just so I move over to C1.

The problem with skin is that it is multilayered, each layer has its own IR character, and it is not uniform in colour. However, when we look at a person our brain will record a more or less uniform colour. The camera records the colours as they are objectively, hence the unnatural look. Add the IR issue and you have your problem.

I used to do a lot of work with color and specifically color printing. Color is a very complicated topic and in the color theory classes that my employer sent me to the problem that the original poster described was introduced on the first day. They kind of used it as a starting point on the topic of sensation vs. perception. It would be impossible for me to distill weeks of classroom study down to a short forum post but let me try to get at the essence of it:

 

There is an objective measurable interaction between an object and the light that hits it. We can build sensors that capture a portion of this interaction in a way that is similar to the way that our eyes do. This is objectively measurable.

 

When we look at the world what we think we see is our perception. The thing that we have in our mind is something more like a HDR, focus stacked, white balance corrected, sharpened image which is highly modified in many ways based upon our past experience. This is what we call perception and by the time that your brain is done manipulating it this way and that it bears little resemblance to the actual sensations that your eyes generate.

 

When we look at a still picture several layers of that processing are no longer available. We can't shift our focus or the white balance or a whole bunch of other factors. Furthermore because it is a still image we can look at it longer.and so things that we wouldn't have time to notice when trying to process the torrent of sensory data coming from our eyes in a moving scene are able to bubble up to our awareness.

 

A really big factor to keep in mind when when looking at a photo is the very real difference between objective reality and perceived reality. When you are paused looking at a captured still photo, there is a very strong desire in some people to apply one of the last steps in your brain's automatic post processing to the image.That is to bring in your vast experience about what you think something like skin tones should look like and override the objectively captured information recorded by the camera.

 

That is not to say the camera is always exactly correct. As Jaap pointed out even the camera has to infer some things like white balance. If you are just trying to be artistic and make a pretty picture do whatever you want. However, if you are doing product photography and you need to make sure that the clothes look the same on the model on the runway with carefully designed lighting, in the catalog, and on the ultimate consumer in the store with their likely florescent lights, and a home with Tungsten lights, and outside then you have to do a huge amount of work.

 

1) As Jaap said profile the camera with a Color Checker passport. You will need to do this under various lighting conditions bright daylight, overcast, and a couple of indoor lighting conditions. With outdoor natural light two things that matters more than most people think it does is elevation and the amount of water vapor in the air. So if you are more than about 1000m higher than lower than the altitude which you calibrated your camera then you want run through the color calibration again. The same is true if you go from a very moist area like near the ocean to a very dry place. Different cameras are more or less sensitive to these changes. In my experience the M is a bit more sensitve to altitude than my T. I don't remember noting a difference with water vapor. When I first calibrated my Leica cameras, I remember thinking "Wow these Germans really are into objective reality vs. making colors look good (which is what other camera vendors often do -- ehm Olympus, Panasonic)." I also remember noting that my color profiles were not really that far off of the "Embedded profile" that was in the camera. However, ACR and LR's color profile was way way off. So one of the things that I put in my default develop presets is to change from "Adobe Standard" to "Embedded profile" for Leica cameras.

 

2) When you say the colors don't look right, what are you looking that them on? The LCD, your computer's monitor, what? Have you calibrated it? How big is its color gamut? Is it good enough to represent the colors the colors recorded? And you haven't messed with the brightness or contrast or any other settings on the monitor since you calibrated it have you? Oh and one more thing what is the ambient illumination source in the room and how does it change throughout the day? The screens are not 100% black body absorbers and so the light source in the room can mix with with the light coming out of the monitor to distort even your sensation of color. If you really want to do it right, you should only edit your photos in a dark room with no natural light on probably a brand new MacBook Pro that you have calibrated with something like a ColorMunki Photo.

 

And all of that is long before you ever try to print something. There you have to deal with the reflectivity and spectral neutrality of the paper, the metamersim of inks or pigments and finally the limited gamut of colors possible with printing.

 

If you want to keep in really simple: Buy a brand new MBP and use Embedded profile rather than Adobe Standard, and only do your editing in at night with the lights off and remember that there is an objective way things actually are and there is an artistic preconception of how you believe things should be.

[jaapv]

There is a solution to ambient light changes: hook your Colormunki up to your computer for continuous  (well, half-hourly) adjustment to the room lighting.

I find the theory of colour well presented in :

"Real World Color Management" by Fraser, Murphy, et al.

[bencoyote]

There is a solution to ambient light changes: hook your Colormunki up to your computer for continuous  (well, half-hourly) adjustment to the room lighting.

I find the theory of colour well presented in :

"Real World Color Management" by Fraser, Murphy, et al.

I'm not sure recalibration over a short time interval would work because of the way that the ColorMunki fits to the screen. But you obviously get the point. ;-) Thankfully LCDs are much more color stable than phosphors being blasted by a particle accelerator i.e. CRT.

 

Looks like a good reference. I'm not sure books like that existed when I was working with color professionally. Digital was brand new and people were still figuring it out. The big guys e.g. Victoria Secret (who were our heros ) had their workflows figured out and I was part of the 2nd or 3rd crop where those gurus passed their knowledge down to us so that we could build parts of it into the next generation of machines to make their lives easier.

 

We used to say, "you have to get the objective colors correct first. Then everything beyond that is artistic." You have to get the objective right first because the image has to go somewhere, even if it just posting it on instagram people will see it on a different device and unless the particular way that the colors are wrong happens to be exactly the same as someone else's all the fine tuning will not be preserved.

 

I think we've got the objective color idea pretty well covered on this thread. That is science not art it is easy. I think that something where the combined forum with their vast experience can really add something is actually in the art of it. Taking the metaphoric, artistic and semi technical language of photoshop and converting it into the artistic and emotive language of skin tone. What makes a particular skin tone wrong? Why do you like a particular set of colors? What does it say to you?

 

For example I find Elmar's color settings posted earlier in the thread really interesting. I haven't gone so far as to try it yet, I don't know what situation it was designed for but I find the concept really interesting.

[jaapv]

No, the Colormunki sits between my screens on a small tripod and measures the ambient light, to adjust the pre-calibrated screens. As you probably know it measures the ambient light as part of the calibration process.

[PaulJohn]

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In Lightroom I find that adjusting the red hue slider to the right under the camera calibration controls very effective. Much more effective than adjusting the red hue in the color/HSL controls but I usually use both, the camera calibration first and then the HSL. I do this after getting white balance right of course.

 

The results are very satisfactory.

Edited January 11, 2017 by PaulJohn

[jto555]

One quick option is, as has been mentioned before, to use ColorChecker Passport. Shoot the colour chart in the same lighting as you subject and to use it to build a (temporary) profile when you process the images. Then colour balance from the photo of the colour chart. I do this in some shoots where I have to get the colour correct. You could name the profile as 'temp' so each new profile that you make will overwrite the earlier one. In this way you do not end up with 6 million different profiles.

 

A couple of downside to this is a that ColorChecker only works with Photoshop and that you will need to restart Photoshop every time you creature a profile.

 

John

[Luke_Miller]

When I got my M8.2 I noticed the skin tone issue.  With most subjects it is not a problem, but with some the result is what I call a ruddy complexion - excessive red/magenta. My Lightroom solution is a custom profile using a colorchecker card and then editing that profile to reduce red saturation.  In my case simply moving to Capture One was not a solution as I saw the same result.  But color editing a problem image and saving the edits as a custom ICC profile did the trick.  I've had to repeat the process when I got the M9 and then again with the M-240.

[LocalHero1953]

When I got my M8.2 I noticed the skin tone issue.  With most subjects it is not a problem, but with some the result is what I call a ruddy complexion - excessive red/magenta. My Lightroom solution is a custom profile using a colorchecker card and then editing that profile to reduce red saturation.  In my case simply moving to Capture One was not a solution as I saw the same result.  But color editing a problem image and saving the edits as a custom ICC profile did the trick.  I've had to repeat the process when I got the M9 and then again with the M-240.

Luke, how do you do this - saving edits in LR as an ICC profile? And what software do you use for editing your custom profiles?

[Luke_Miller]

Luke, how do you do this - saving edits in LR as an ICC profile? And what software do you use for editing your custom profiles?

Sorry, I was referring to C1's ability to do that. For Lightroom I photograph my ColorChecker card under daylight and tungsten illumination and then use the Adobe DNG Profile Editor to create and edit Lightroom profiles.

Edited January 11, 2017 by Luke_Miller

[LocalHero1953]

OK, I understand - thanks.

[jonoslack]

There is an objective measurable interaction between an object and the light that hits it. We can build sensors that capture a portion of this interaction in a way that is similar to the way that our eyes do. This is objectively measurable.

When we look at the world what we think we see is our perception. The thing that we have in our mind is something more like a HDR, focus stacked, white balance corrected, sharpened image which is highly modified in many ways based upon our past experience. This is what we call perception and by the time that your brain is done manipulating it this way and that it bears little resemblance to the actu

Thank You Ben

This is such a wonderful encapsulation of what I feel about colour - I could add"

 

"There is no such thing as a 'correct' white balance in a scene which has mixed lighting (which includes any image with shade in it)."

 

More literally, if there is a variation in colour temperature in a scene, there isn't a way to get the white balance right.

 

The think about people's brains doing HDR, focus stacking and white balance correction, is that (probably) we all do it differently, and if that's the case, then we almost certainly also look at images we see with our own personal set of 'corrections'.

 

The upshot of this (to me) is that

1. If you're doing colour corrected work, in controlled lighting conditions, or if you're working in a team on a photographic project - then all the monitors and printer profiles should be properly calibrated and checked daily but

2. If you're shooting in mixed light (which includes light with shadows) - then there is no such thing as 'correct', and you should be aiming for 'Excellent' - which is what the end user likes (or indeed what the photographer likes in my case) whether they're looking on Facebook or at a high quality print. "Correct" is not an option, so why strive for anything other than "Brilliant"!

[OHollis]

On 1/11/2017 at 2:11 PM, Luke_Miller said:

When I got my M8.2 I noticed the skin tone issue.  With most subjects it is not a problem, but with some the result is what I call a ruddy complexion - excessive red/magenta. My Lightroom solution is a custom profile using a colorchecker card and then editing that profile to reduce red saturation.  In my case simply moving to Capture One was not a solution as I saw the same result.  But color editing a problem image and saving the edits as a custom ICC profile did the trick.  I've had to repeat the process when I got the M9 and then again with the M-240.

Hi Luke, I have just come across this post. I recently purchased an M262 to replace my M9. I am currently going through the agonising process of comparing the two and trying to decide whether I am even capable of letting go of the M9. I see that you have been through the M8, M9 and M240, and I was wondering how you feel about the colours of the M240 having owned the previous two Ms. Have you found a comfortable process in Lightroom that allows you to get what you want? What kind of adjustments get your images where you want them compared to adjustments you made for the M9? I love the blue/greens that seem to come out of the M9 by default and I'm struggling to adjust to the heavy red/orange cast that seems to come out of the 262. If the M9 weren't 12 years old I would be less eager to upgrade but the age, the screen and the fear of mechanical failure are all making me feel its time to move on. It feels like switching film stocks though. Any thoughts would be most gratefully appreciated.

[jaapv]

The simplest solution is to use a B+W 486 filter   Disregard any Internet advice to the contrary. And profile the camera using the XRite Colorchecker Passport. Have the camera on the latest firmware. 

[Luke_Miller]

2 hours ago, OHollis said:

Have you found a comfortable process in Lightroom that allows you to get what you want? 

My solution has been custom Lightroom DNG profiles using the DNG Profile editor.  But the problem I was addressing across my Leica models was the ruddy skin tones, which as jaapv suggests, result from Leica's IR sensitivity.  

Edited November 17, 2021 by Luke_Miller

[OHollis]

Thank you to both Jaapv and Luke for the quick responses. I will get the filter Jaapv suggested and experiment with custom DNGs. Much appreciated, guys. I already have the Xrite passport and am working with it to get better colours.

Edited November 17, 2021 by OHollis

[Herr Barnack]

I have found with my M-P 240 (in use 5+ years) that if I get the white balance right, I don't have problems with skin tones.

Am I the only one who can say this?? 🤔

Edited November 17, 2021 by Herr Barnack

[lct]

15 minutes ago, Herr Barnack said:

I have found with my M-P 240 (in use 5+ years) that if I get the white balance right, I don't have problems with skin tones.

Am I the only one who can say this?? 🤔

M-P 240 i don't know but the M240 had skin tone issues that have been fixed by firmware update in 2013 if memory serves me well. Since then reds tend to clip too easily but this is easy to adjust in PP and has little to do with skin tone issues per se IMHO.

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Hallo,

Look here: Leica M

[kivis]

I shoot black and white. What's a skin tone?