Help: How to stop M8 from adding green to JPEG

[Cjh2000]

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My newly acquired M8 will be much more enjoyable if it can stop adding green to my JPEG file.

First of all, I'm only a hobbyist and not a professional. I will take JPEG file if the output is decent because I don't want to sit in my computer editing RAW files. For the last week I've been shooting fall foliage and the JPEG file all turn my yellow leaves into yellow-green leaves. Very annoying!

I am using Voigtlander 40mm f1.4 lens with B+W 486 UV/IR filter. Camera firmware is 2.024. I have already set color saturation to low. The Raw files is much truer to original color while the JPEG all bias to green regardless of my color saturation setting.

Does anyone have the same problem and is there a way to set the camera to not adding green color to JPEG files? It would save my day if anyone can help. Thanks. CJ

The left is DNG file, and the right is JPEG.

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[jaapv]

Well, editing raw files is a lot less work than fighting a JPG which naturally lacks- data. I mean, how much work is it to hit the Auto button in lightroom and tweak a couple of sliders?

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[david strachan]

The M8 jpg's do have a nasty green hue in Lightroom, and difficult to correct.  And a very lurid green when photographing lawns.

Best to use the DNG files as they are good colours ( I always use auto white balance WB) and lovely plasticy to manipulate.

I used to shoot just JPG's during first year or so with my first M8, and argue with Jaap that JPG's were good enough 😐.  But after getting tired of the greens...well i now just shoot raw DNG files. They are a lot more fun to process.

Welcome to the Leica family Cjh2000.

...

Edited October 27, 2020 by david strachan
Hello Percy..

[adan]

I expect you are using "Auto" White Balance. And my guess is the camera is seeing the fair amount of beige (ground, middle building and chimney, even the autumn leaves) and assuming they are actually gray, and removing an equivalent amount of reddish-yellow from everything.

As your samples show. Gray house, gray chimney, gray path in foreground.

If one must shoot jegs, one has to pay attention to the camera's white balance settings, and perhaps use a preset (daylight, cloudy, shade, flash) instead of counting on "Auto"  - which has no idea what colors you are actually photographing.

https://diyvideoeditor.com/the-friday-roundup-color-grades-white-balance-and-audio/amp/

Or even a custom white-balance: call up that option in the menu, and then present the camera with a "known" neutral gray or white object and make an exposure with that filling the image area. The camera will then memorize the color change needed to get that neutral target to actually be "neutral"under the available light - until such time as you change the WB setting again.

One can, if one has the shooting knowledge, even set a fixed "kelvin degrees" white-balance, to add yellow by setting a high Kelvin light color (blue-white) or a low Kelvin number (orange-white).

As one might expect, pre-set "daylight" WB assumes a full spectrum of sunlight. If it is a blue day or an orange sunset, the camera will not try to "fix" that, just render it as captured.

Cloudy assumes blue overcast, and will add back yellow/red (what you want in your case), Shade adds even more yellow-red, tungsten (traditional indoor light bulbs) will add a LOT of blue, "fluorescent" will usually add blue-pink to counteract the greenish color of fluoro tubes.

Keep in mind that the white balance correction runs opposite to the actual color of the available light - the idea is to correct for lighting problems.

Set for blue light, the camera adds yellow to the picture; correcting for yellow light the camera adds blue to the picture.

https://improvephotography.com/50250/white-balance-basics-a-mini-guide-for-photographers/

Edited October 27, 2020 by adan

[Tom1234]

54 minutes ago, adan said:

I expect you are using "Auto" White Balance. And my guess is the camera is seeing the fair amount of beige (ground, middle building and chimney, even the autumn leaves) and assuming they are actually gray, and removing an equivalent amount of reddish-yellow from everything.

As your samples show. Gray house, gray chimney, gray path in foreground.

If one must shoot jegs, one has to pay attention to the camera's white balance settings, and perhaps use a preset (daylight, cloudy, shade, flash) instead of counting on "Auto"  - which has no idea what colors you are actually photographing.

https://diyvideoeditor.com/the-friday-roundup-color-grades-white-balance-and-audio/amp/

Or even a custom white-balance: call up that option in the menu, and then present the camera with a "known" neutral gray or white object and make an exposure with that filling the image area. The camera will then memorize the color change needed to get that neutral target to actually be "neutral"under the available light - until such time as you change the WB setting again.

One can, if one has the shooting knowledge, even set a fixed "kelvin degrees" white-balance, to add yellow by setting a high Kelvin light color (blue-white) or a low Kelvin number (orange-white).

As one might expect, pre-set "daylight" WB assumes a full spectrum of sunlight. If it is a blue day or an orange sunset, the camera will not try to "fix" that, just render it as captured.

Cloudy assumes blue overcast, and will add back yellow/red (what you want in your case), Shade adds even more yellow-red, tungsten (traditional indoor light bulbs) will add a LOT of blue, "fluorescent" will usually add blue-pink to counteract the greenish color of fluoro tubes.

Keep in mind that the white balance correction runs opposite to the actual color of the available light - the idea is to correct for lighting problems.

Set for blue light, the camera adds yellow to the picture; correcting for yellow light the camera adds blue to the picture.

https://improvephotography.com/50250/white-balance-basics-a-mini-guide-for-photographers/

Are there any rules of thumb for doing this color adjustment?  Like the sun is going down or coming up, you want the color cast, how do you set the color in the camera to capture it?

[adan]

Using the "daylight" setting will effectively turn your output into old-fashioned daylight color slide film. Shoot in full sunlight (~2-3 hours either side of high noon) and you will capture the actual color of "things" themselves.

Shoot at other times of day with the "daylight" setting, and you will get the color of things as modified by the changing color of the light itself - the actual red/orange/pink color of sunsets and sunrises, the actual golden-yellow glow of early morning or late afternoon sunlight, the "blue/purple" of dusk once the sun is down, the glaring orange-yellow of artifical indoor lights (although LED bulbs have changed that a bit). Colored light as in store signs or Xmas lights should come out about the colors the eye normally perceives - red neon, greens, blues,  etc.

Just like slide film.

The "flash" setting will be every-so-slightly less magenta than the "daylight" setting in the final picture - because the spark (read: lightning bolt) in electronic flashes is not quite the same spectrum as sunlight (that constant thermonuclear explosion going off 93 million miles away).

It pays for photographers to become familiar with the concepts of color temperature and Rayleigh scattering, which influence and explain the color of light all over the world (and the universe).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_scattering

While always noting that camera settings for correcting light color run backwards - under excessively blue light one usually wants to make the picture less blue, so the correction for 12000°K light is the inverse of the actual color of 12000°K light. If the scene lighting has a color temperature of 9000°K, which will look blue - setting the camera to 9000°K will make the picture yellower, as a cure. Takes a little getting used to.

As does the fact that color temperature also runs counter to our intuitive impression of color and heat. Heat a black chunk of metal to 900°K and it glows red-hot - heat it to 3200°K and it glows yellow-hot - heat it to 5800°K (approximately the Sun's surface temperature) and it glows "white-hot" - and heat it to the surface temperature of the blue star Rigel (~11000°K), and it will glow blue-hot (if it doesn't melt first ). Nevertheless the cool shaded side of a building, lit only by blue sky, will come out blue-ish. Color temperature 10000°K, actual temperature maybe 283°K/10°C/50°F.

As a final note, gas-discharge lights like most street or farm lights these days (sodium vapor, or older mercury vapor) have really screwy, discontinuous spectrums. Sometimes there is no correction that really works for "fix" those, because their spectrums are missing so many greens or blues or reds altogether. But again, their replacement with LED sources may change that in the future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-vapor_lamp#/media/File:HG-Spektrum_crop.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-vapor_lamp#/media/File:Spectrum-hp-sodium.jpg

[Cjh2000]

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Thank you all for responding...

Glad to know I am not the first one to see the excessive green and that my used M8 is not mal-functioning. Funny I see very few people complaining about it.

I will experiment with the WB setting.

I am learning to be more productive at organizing, editing and showing the photos on the mobile and desktop setting. I do, however, enjoy going out and taking pictures more than sitting in front of computers. But if the JPEG won't work for me, I will learn to use the raw files. Luckily for M8, I am taking far less photos and the raw files are small enough to be manageable  (on my computer).

[tobey bilek]

Greens are mucked up if you do not use the UV /ir filter.

Otherwise use non auto WB as explained above.

If DNG look good in raw,  there is some preset lurking somewhere.