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AWB and LFI issue


icemanhk

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Hi there!

 

I got my grey M9 in Dec and enjoy during my Xmas holidays.

 

I found my pictures always have yellow cast, sometimes the yellow cast is very serious. My M8 performs better in all situation, at least, no more jaundice.

 

I know it is easy to be corrected by manual WB or fixed in post processing. However some reviews said M9's AWB is accurate, but mine is not. So, is it my M9 problem?

 

Besides, how long does it take to deliver the LFI? I am entitled to have 1 year free subscription, and got Leica email confirmed on Dec, but I received nothing at the moment. I want to contact LFI & Leica, but I don't know the email address...

 

Sorry for poor English. Thanks.

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try this for leica:

 

sunil.kaul@leica-camera.com

 

try these for lfi:

 

email: lfi@interabo.de or mail@lfi-online.de

 

since you live in hong kong, try calling schmidt marketing or take the camera for checking by their technicians at their service centre:

 

13th floor, chinachem exchange square, 1 hoi wan street, quarry bay, hk

+852 3650 0668

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Yellowish casts with AWB in interior lighting is a common complaint, both with the M8 and the M9. It is a bit further off in the M9, I think, but maybe the long-promised firmware update will improve things. See other threads on this site for discussion. Leica puts a cutoff in the calculated AWB color temperature to keep it from ever going below a value approximately 3000K. This allows shots which are done by candlelight to retain the color of candlelight, but it leaves things too yellow for my taste when you are shooting under incandescent light.

 

LFI can say the AWB is "accurate" if they like, and it is under daylight and some mixed conditions, where the M8 does quite well, but it is a compromise meant to look right for some reasonable set of conditions.

 

scott

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Right. The M9 handles halogen light pretty well (c. 3200K) but AWB cannot correct tungsten (2200 to 2600K depending on wattage). This is why there is a 'tungsten' setting in the 'set' menu. Use it. If you do much shooting under tungsten light, incorporate that setting or a suitable manually set Kelvin value into a user profile.

 

Similarly, there are two different settings for fluorescent lighting, which AWB cannot ever handle because the light is not 'black body radiation' but has a discontinuous band spectrum.

 

The old man from the Age of Kerosene Lamps

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After numerous attempts at fixing subscription problems over the years I eventually abandoned LFI as a source of their own magazines. I now just pick up occasional copies from camera stores that carry the magazine in stock.

 

Perhaps they have improved over the two or three years since then. Many years ago (>10) my subscription just arrived like clockwork. It would be nice if they could get back to that performance, but I could not take the hassle any more.

 

FWIW

 

Robert

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Tungsten light has been a problem for me with every digital camera -- not just Leica. It is even more difficult today when perhaps some but not all "tungsten" bulbs are really compact flourescents. For me the only way to get decent color balance in such situations is to manually set the wb with an expodisc of similar method. If you don't want to do that, my experience is that the "tungsten" setting is somewhat better than AWB and will be more consistent.

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David: Can you fix the link please? It just goes back to the forum home page. Thanks.

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iceman--

Welcome to the forum! Glad you've got the camera, and I'm sorry about the color balance issue.

 

If the above comments don't seem to address the problem, you might want to post an example or two, and mention what kind of light you were shooting in (if it's not obvious).

 

Also, have you tried using the manual white balance settings, just to see if the problem goes further than just AWB?

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Tungsten light has been a problem for me with every digital camera -- not just Leica. It is even more difficult today when perhaps some but not all "tungsten" bulbs are really compact flourescents. For me the only way to get decent color balance in such situations is to manually set the wb with an expodisc of similar method. If you don't want to do that, my experience is that the "tungsten" setting is somewhat better than AWB and will be more consistent.

No matter what you do, fluorescent 'energy saving bulbs' produce a nasty lemon colour, and standard fluorescent settings are not much help. I have produced a manual white balance on my own bulbs (Osram) and incorporated that into a separate user profile I named "FlBulb". I switch over to that whenever fluorescent bulbs are the main light source, and I am at least in the ballpark. The two 'fluorescent' WB settings in the menu are for strip lights only.

 

And yes, I do always carry an Expodisc in my camera bag. Life was simpler with Tri-X. On the other hand, it was more complex with Kodachrome ...

 

The old man from the Age of Kerosene Lamps

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Hello! Thanks all for the comment! It really solved my question marks :)

 

I believe yellowish is caused by energy saving bulb...it is because I tested it again yesterday, and the AWB perform well.

 

See below example

 

4306551981_d142df9dd3_b.jpg

 

4306534393_c2ac6a8038_b.jpg

 

 

 

For LFI issue, I contact LFI, they said it was sent out in the end of Dec. They will resend it to me.

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