Bad M240 colors - a fairy tale

[k-hawinkler]

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I am fairly happy—for both the M9 and the M (Typ 240)—with dual-illuminant camera profiles created with a Gretag-Macbeth Color Checker 24-patch chart and Adobe DNG Profile Editor 1.04. However it took three or four attempts to get the chart shots right. The quality of the final profiles delicately depends on the quality of the captures of the colour chart—in particular, on proper lighting and exposure.

 

The main issues with the standard profiles in Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom—i. e. "Embedded" and "Adobe Standard"—are reds in general and skin tones in particular being too magenta, and all colours being way too saturated. Also blues are leaning towards the reddish side.

 

 

Thanks. Are you willing to make your profiles available?

[zlatkob]

Overgaard wrote this. But is this assured information or speculation? I think speculation. If the colors of Kodachrome would have been so bad like the colors of the M9 without profiling, nobody wuld have boucht it.

 

M9 color photos do not look like Kodachrome to me. Look at Steve McCurry's photos from the last roll of Kodachrome -- does M9 color look like that?

 

Kodachrome came out in the 1930's. I doubt it would have been used as "the color model" for a digital sensor 70 years later. More likely, the engineers were familiar with Kodachrome as well as with more modern films, and referred to them at some point, but did not use any specific film as the model. Of course, I'm speculating; any concrete info on this topic would be interesting.

[zlatkob]

10 more examples of Kodachrome color, starting at this page: kodachromememory | Book Preview | Nathan Benn Photographs

[lct]

Which Kodachrome colours? K25? K64? K200? Not the same at all.

[charlesphoto99]

I would say the M9 look is much more Fujichrome 50 or 100 or even Ektachrome 100 than Kodachrome.

[algrove]

I would say the M9 look is much more Fujichrome 50 or 100 or even Ektachrome 100 than Kodachrome.

 

More like K64, but not K25 to me and my eye.

[r7photo]

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Haven gotten my M, I like the colors, more latitude

[MirekE]

We had nice overcast sky yesterday and it was a great opportunity to re-shoot test targets in even daylight and re-calibrate. I only do single illuminant, daylight profiles. I don't have any ~2800k lightbulb light source available that would be able to sufficiently evenly lit the targets and even if I did, the artificial light I shoot in is not from traditional light bulbs or halogens anymore, it is a combination of different fluorescent and incandescent light sources and individual profiles work for me here better.

 

I have three calibration tools - Passport, Adobe DNG Profiler and QPCalibration.

 

Passport has beautiful target - great to carry around for creating ad-hoc profiles, but for general use, to my eyes, the colors are often less acceptable than from the other tools.

 

Adobe DNG Profiler is free and gives nice results. The large ColorChecker is easier to use with Leica M than the small Passport or QPCard.

 

QPCalibration is different in that it uses dye formulations specifically designed for profiling sensors, unlike ColorChecker. I usually like the QPCalibration results a bit better than from the other tools. The software is very nice, but to my knowledge does not allow dual illuminant profiles and the physical target design is atrocious.

 

I used all three and my personal preference is the QPCalibration profile. Passport nature colors like sky and foliage are similar to the Embeded, but skin tones look weird. Adobe DNG Profiler is the closest to Embedded. I think the skin tones are nicer, but I don't have enough skin tone images at this point to make any assertions.

 

The QPCalibration has a nice feature that allows visualization of the corrections. Here is what it did on my camera:

 

If anybody wants to play with the profiles, you can grab them here:

http://elsners.org/misc/m-profiles.zip