Where is the purple

[phillym]

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Just purchased M8. Settings all default. Took several shots of Purple Flowers and they were displayed in playback as blue. Downloaded to computer and same. Anyone have this same situation?

[mjh]

Purple is a difficult colour for cameras with an RGB sensor. Yellow or orange is registered as a mixture of red and green, and cyan as a mixture of green and blue. But violet or purple? That would be a mixture of red and blue, only the wavelength of red is as far from the wavelength of violet/purple as it gets – it's at the other end of the spectrum. Thus, no red is detected. The only reason a camera can tell violet and purple from blue at all is because the transmission curve of the green-sensitive pixels is comparatively broad and extends far into the blue part of the spectrum. Thus, if the camera detects mainly blue and still some green, it can infer that the colour is blue, but if there is just blue and no green, the colour might actually be violet or purple. But this heuristic is error-prone and sometimes the camera will guess wrong.