Leica M11 -purplish tint ???

[Stevejack]

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4 hours ago, charlesphoto99 said:

Do you make your living dependent on color accuracy (or b&w tonality)?

 

8 minutes ago, charlesphoto99 said:

And FTR, I've never shot a gray card in my life - it's just not my style, slows me down too much, so I prefer to fix in post.

This is pure curiosity (as a layman in colour) and not intended to be provocative; How are you getting away with making your living dependent on colour accuracy but just fixing it in post? As accurate as your eye may be, surely there would be a margin of error introduced there?   Again - not intended to be provocative, just a genuine question because I'm interested in how the whole process works. 

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[charlesphoto99]

2 hours ago, _tc said:

I'm actually quite happy to listen to experience; however I am still unclear about what actual experience you have specific to color science since you're now making that statement.

Did you study it at university or post-graduate? Do you have publications? Again it's not that I don't believe you could have them, it's that you haven't stated what you do that would actually qualify you as an expert. Printing a lot of color photographs aint it but I'm expecting you have some actual study here and all I'm saying is you could just go ahead and lead off with that.

School of life, buddy. Not sure what you're after. One doesn't have to be a scientist to understand science. Over and out. 

Edited January 29 by charlesphoto99

[charlesphoto99]

2 hours ago, Stevejack said:

 

This is pure curiosity (as a layman in colour) and not intended to be provocative; How are you getting away with making your living dependent on colour accuracy but just fixing it in post? As accurate as your eye may be, surely there would be a margin of error introduced there?   Again - not intended to be provocative, just a genuine question because I'm interested in how the whole process works. 

My photography is based solely on experience, and knowing what I like, and how things should look (and sometimes skewing that because it looks better corrected in a way that is better than it actually was in person). One could shoot all the gray cards the world and still get it wrong, esp once the ink hits paper, either in inkjet or offset. I guess accuracy was a wrong term - making it look good is a better way of putting it. I used to shoot for a magazine that to my eyes was (and still is) printed too green. So I would add magenta to my final files, knowing the printer wasn't making corrections on their end. Sometimes knowing when to not overcorrect for tungsten or fluorescent lighting to make the artificial look more 'natural' if that makes any sense. The world, and light and color, isn't always perfect, but what one's camera (or film) does is repeatable and knowable. Part of that comes from shooting slides for years. One got what they got, and exposure was key. I mostly leave my M's at 5600K WB, and then adjust in post to recall the scene, which might not be a perfect relation to what it actually was, but it doesn't have to be - it just has to be GOOD.

Now, of course, if one is shooting artwork, or something that needs to be perfectly neutral, or a very repetitive non-changing scene, then shooting a gray card can be a very good working practice (which I probably have done at some point, but my recall isn't perfect either). Gray cards are just not very practical in real world, fast moving situations. Working with a good, neutral, LUT calibrated monitor is key as  well. One thing that my book publisher laments is the fact that print making is becoming a lost art to many new photographers. But screens are all different, so if you want something to match, it has to be made in a hard copy to match. For example, my last book was all b&w duotones. I worked with one of the best (and sadly maybe last) duotone maker in the world, and he had to reteach me how to correct my files for good duotone offset printing versus how I'd been printing the same files on an inkjet printer. But the inkjet prints had to match how I wanted them to appear in the book, so at press check we had a reference. So it's as much of an art as it is a rigid science. 

[charlesphoto99]

1 hour ago, _tc said:

I was looking to clarify if you had actual expertise or just vibes; I have a solid answer now thank you.

No freaking idea who are you are; but you know who I am- links in my signature. Enough said. And my daughter is named Leica: is that enough vibes for you? 

[Stevejack]

1 hour ago, charlesphoto99 said:

My photography is based solely on experience, and knowing what I like, and how things should look (and sometimes skewing that because it looks better corrected in a way that is better than it actually was in person). One could shoot all the gray cards the world and still get it wrong, esp once the ink hits paper, either in inkjet or offset. I guess accuracy was a wrong term - making it look good is a better way of putting it. I used to shoot for a magazine that to my eyes was (and still is) printed too green. So I would add magenta to my final files, knowing the printer wasn't making corrections on their end. Sometimes knowing when to not overcorrect for tungsten or fluorescent lighting to make the artificial look more 'natural' if that makes any sense. The world, and light and color, isn't always perfect, but what one's camera (or film) does is repeatable and knowable. Part of that comes from shooting slides for years. One got what they got, and exposure was key. I mostly leave my M's at 5600K WB, and then adjust in post to recall the scene, which might not be a perfect relation to what it actually was, but it doesn't have to be - it just has to be GOOD.

Now, of course, if one is shooting artwork, or something that needs to be perfectly neutral, or a very repetitive non-changing scene, then shooting a gray card can be a very good working practice (which I probably have done at some point, but my recall isn't perfect either). Gray cards are just not very practical in real world, fast moving situations. Working with a good, neutral, LUT calibrated monitor is key as  well. One thing that my book publisher laments is the fact that print making is becoming a lost art to many new photographers. But screens are all different, so if you want something to match, it has to be made in a hard copy to match. For example, my last book was all b&w duotones. I worked with one of the best (and sadly maybe last) duotone maker in the world, and he had to reteach me how to correct my files for good duotone offset printing versus how I'd been printing the same files on an inkjet printer. But the inkjet prints had to match how I wanted them to appear in the book, so at press check we had a reference. So it's as much of an art as it is a rigid science. 

Thank you that's a brilliant explanation. I've spoken with people who are digitally reproducing artwork for painters and the process of making sure the colours match from the original to the print does still seem to be a little more art than science. And as you say, you can have everything 'correct' on your end as a digital file but once ink hits paper there are so many more variables involved again. 
I'm not concerned with replicating the exact colours from a scene (I shoot black and white mostly!), but I do like to know that what I'm seeing on my screen during editing will match my final prints. I use an EIZO which keeps itself pretty well calibrated, and I've had custom profiles created for my printer for a few different papers that I use frequently but at the end of the day I'm with you - it doesn't have to be exact it just needs to look good and that always involves a bit of tweaking at the final stage.

[charlesphoto99]

2 minutes ago, Stevejack said:

Thank you that's a brilliant explanation. I've spoken with people who are digitally reproducing artwork for painters and the process of making sure the colours match from the original to the print does still seem to be a little more art than science. And as you say, you can have everything 'correct' on your end as a digital file but once ink hits paper there are so many more variables involved again. 
I'm not concerned with replicating the exact colours from a scene (I shoot black and white mostly!), but I do like to know that what I'm seeing on my screen during editing will match my final prints. I use an EIZO which keeps itself pretty well calibrated, and I've had custom profiles created for my printer for a few different papers that I use frequently but at the end of the day I'm with you - it doesn't have to be exact it just needs to look good and that always involves a bit of tweaking at the final stage.

Sounds like you have it pretty well dialed in. Eizo's are great; I have an older NEC equivalent that is chugging along, though when it finally bites the dust I'll be replacing it with an Eizo. 

The late, great Larry Fink said this (I used this quote in a talk I gave a couple of weeks ago): 

“That’s the thing about a photograph and the thing about truth, they’re all malleable.” Of course he's not talking about shooting catalog photos, but the sublime ones we make of everyday life and the weird and wonderful things we encounter as we stumble through the world. 

[kiwidad]

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On 1/27/2025 at 1:08 PM, charlesphoto99 said:

I have been shooting (and printing) professionally for 35 years. I would hope I know how to view color by now. Sunsets are a whole different ballgame and pretty hard to judge vs mid day light. 

your almost as old as me then. 

as far as viewing color, if you mean seeing a perfect white or adjusting for small variances in environment, I bet you don't. Human eye and brain are just not that accurate! Nothing personal but having travelled down the road of analog to digital in both photo and print and desktop, very very very few people can discern  correct white and that why we have calibration tools for monitors and don't forget too consider room lighting. 

 

[charlesphoto99]

2 hours ago, kiwidad said:

your almost as old as me then. 

as far as viewing color, if you mean seeing a perfect white or adjusting for small variances in environment, I bet you don't. Human eye and brain are just not that accurate! Nothing personal but having travelled down the road of analog to digital in both photo and print and desktop, very very very few people can discern  correct white and that why we have calibration tools for monitors and don't forget too consider room lighting. 

 

I'm 60, 61 next week (ugh).

Of course. That's why I'm sitting in front of an NEC monitor calibrated to D65 with a 2.2 gamma at 140 nits, and have a Just Normlicht daylight fluorescent viewing booth to the left of me. That said, I'll typically view a print (or test print) under the booth, but also outside (if possible), and inside daylight with no overheads, and under average LED lighting, because most print buyers won't have optimum lighting, or it changes throughout the day. And I'm not saying I'm a machine - I can easily get it wrong as well. Sometimes it can even just be the mood one is in that day, or from fatigue, eye strain, migraine, etc. 

What I do see consistently is a magenta WB bias with M11 photos, including one that was just posted yesterday. It's not much, but a small nudge to the right of the tint slider (and/or a calibration under the camera calibration settings and/or hue - it can get complicated) would make it look much more natural looking, imo. See post #6412 under M11 images , and I don't mean to single anyone out, these are just for example, also see post 6404 and 6403. 

Anyway, this all reminds me my monitor is due for a calibration. Out comes the hockey puck...

[don daniel]

I don’t need professional equipment to see this. I can already see it on the display of my M11. I see it on the iMac, on the MacBook, on the Surface Laptop, on the iPhone. I see it in the JPGs straight out of the camera, I see it in the DNGs in any RAW converter. I see it in photos taken in all natural lighting conditions, in good and bad weather. I see it with AWB and with fixed white balance settings. The only situations where I don’t see a magenta cast are often under artificial lighting. THAT is what the M11 can do.

Anyone who does NOT see this can keep arguing that color perception is subjective. That might even be true. But this isn’t about whether we like something or not. A magenta cast can certainly be aesthetically pleasing at times. The issue here is a clearly measurable miscalibration. A neutral-colored, i.e., gray surface, is only rendered without a magenta cast by the M11 in daylight if a manual white balance is performed before the shot. Otherwise, you can measure the magenta cast afterward with the eyedropper tool if you don’t see it: blue and red values will be elevated compared to green.

[charlesphoto99]

11 minutes ago, don daniel said:

I don’t need professional equipment to see this. I can already see it on the display of my M11. I see it on the iMac, on the MacBook, on the Surface Laptop, on the iPhone. I see it in the JPGs straight out of the camera, I see it in the DNGs in any RAW converter. I see it in photos taken in all natural lighting conditions, in good and bad weather. I see it with AWB and with fixed white balance settings. The only situations where I don’t see a magenta cast are often under artificial lighting. THAT is what the M11 can do.

Anyone who does NOT see this can keep arguing that color perception is subjective. That might even be true. But this isn’t about whether we like something or not. A magenta cast can certainly be aesthetically pleasing at times. The issue here is a clearly measurable miscalibration. A neutral-colored, i.e., gray surface, is only rendered without a magenta cast by the M11 in daylight if a manual white balance is performed before the shot. Otherwise, you can measure the magenta cast afterward with the eyedropper tool if you don’t see it: blue and red values will be elevated compared to green.

Spot on 100%. The attempt at gaslighting is ludicrous. And it's not saying the M11 is a bad camera, it's just that the color straight out of it is patently off for all to see (if they care to see it) and it's doing a disservice to those users who are not savvy enough to correct it in post. I saw it straight away from the first week the camera was out and people were posting uncorrected jpegs. 

[Jamie Roberts]

5 hours ago, don daniel said:

I don’t need professional equipment to see this. I can already see it on the display of my M11. I see it on the iMac, on the MacBook, on the Surface Laptop, on the iPhone. I see it in the JPGs straight out of the camera, I see it in the DNGs in any RAW converter. I see it in photos taken in all natural lighting conditions, in good and bad weather. I see it with AWB and with fixed white balance settings. The only situations where I don’t see a magenta cast are often under artificial lighting. THAT is what the M11 can do.

Anyone who does NOT see this can keep arguing that color perception is subjective. That might even be true. But this isn’t about whether we like something or not. A magenta cast can certainly be aesthetically pleasing at times. The issue here is a clearly measurable miscalibration. A neutral-colored, i.e., gray surface, is only rendered without a magenta cast by the M11 in daylight if a manual white balance is performed before the shot. Otherwise, you can measure the magenta cast afterward with the eyedropper tool if you don’t see it: blue and red values will be elevated compared to green.

*Any* raw converter?

If you've seen it in C1, from a fixed WB on the M11P, and you have a fixed gray reference to compare it with in post (or even something close like a lot of pavement), under daylight, then you are indeed seeing things IMO!  

I don't *measure* (or see with my own Eizos) any magenta bias whatsoever in those conditions. I'd be happy to be proven wrong for diagnostic reasons, but for my body, at least, the way I'm measuring, the shift / bias just isn't there.

Neutral surfaces under daylight with the camera manually set to 5500K WB are just fine (within a few RGB points of pure grey) in C1 as "shot." They are *not* magenta shifted. So you don't have to take a WB measurement first: just shoot consistently and adjust, if necessary, once for each set of light conditions (eg daylight vs artificial), in post. Copy and paste is your friend--soon AI will do this for you  

This is the way for all digital cameras. 

Is the Leica AWB lousy? Yes. So is Canon's and Nikon's IMO: I shoot them exactly the same way. Is lousy AWB exacerbated on the Leica Ms? Yes, yes it is. 

Adobe DNG colour? Yes--it's magenta by default and I hate it. All of the shots I've seen with a strong magenta bias shots have come from that processor. But then I've never liked their raw color model across a dozen cameras or more, for a very long time, especially when doing something more color critical like printing. 

YMMV. But at this point I've shot 10k shots+ with the M11P and haven't had a magenta bias problem. 

Edited January 30 by Jamie Roberts

[hdmesa]

5 hours ago, Jamie Roberts said:

...But at this point I've shot 10k shots+ with the M11P and haven't had a magenta bias problem. 

You either haven't trained yourself to see it, or you live at a latitude and altitude and shoot environments where it's not provoked.

The M11 Auto WB isn't "lousy". Lousy is all over the map. The M11 Auto WB in daylight is quite consistent. Where I live, it quite consistently favors a magenta tint bias during bright daylight hours. At sunrise/sunset, I don't see a magenta tint bias as often – either the magenta is complimentary in that lighting and blends in and/or the Auto WB has an easier time with sunrise/sunset lighting.

[charlesphoto99]

17 hours ago, Jamie Roberts said:

*Any* raw converter?

If you've seen it in C1, from a fixed WB on the M11P, and you have a fixed gray reference to compare it with in post (or even something close like a lot of pavement), under daylight, then you are indeed seeing things IMO!  

 

Thing is, this is not how probably 90% or more of people who buy this camera are using it. Of course there are workarounds for everything. But Lightroom still remains the convertor of choice (recall that Leica used to give a free sub to it with purchase of one of their bodies) and most people don't know the single WB setting trick and go with the default AWB. This is what is known as a straw man argument. 

[lct]

C1, Silkypix, and even jpegs show faultless colors when setting WB properly. Just a little effort to make if you don't expect robots to do the work for you. Been doing this for 20+ years. No rocket science.

[Smogg]

When you walk down the street and take pictures, you usually don't run up to strangers and ask them to hold a gray card. As a result, after the walk you get 300 frames with completely random values and white balance shifts, since the lighting was uneven. During post-processing, after correcting 5-6 frames by eye, your internal balance gets lost and your brain perceives the normal balance incorrectly. Personally, for this I was forced to install a big gray reflector near the computer to "zero" the white balance in my head. To do this, I look at it for 20 seconds between pictures. I had dozens of cameras, but I only have this with the M11. Is this normal? How long can you defend Leica, given that it has not corrected its mistake for 3 years, deliberately pretending that nothing is happening and ignoring the fair complaints of its customers? This is some kind of sectarianism, when even objective criticism is unacceptable.

[charlesphoto99]

1 hour ago, lct said:

C1, Silkypix, and even jpegs show faultless colors when setting WB properly. Just a little effort to make if you don't expect robots to do the work for you. Been doing this for 20+ years. No rocket science.

Did you even read my (and others) previous posts? Or are you just being willfully obtuse? One can know how to do these things and advocate for others that don't at the same time, and the fact that this shouldn't have to be done across the board to begin with. 

Edited January 31 by charlesphoto99

[hdmesa]

3 hours ago, charlesphoto99 said:

Did you even read my (and others) previous posts? Or are you just being willfully obtuse? One can know how to do these things and advocate for others that don't at the same time, and the fact that this shouldn't have to be done across the board to begin with. 

Just as soon as we all come to consensus again for the 100th time, here they come again… It’s trolling in my book. Dragging their anchor across the cables on the ocean floor.

[Ray Harrison]

It's hard to tell the consensus here if there is one. I know that (depending on shooting conditions) my Nikon can get an orangy tint in AWB, my Phase can get a very heavy nuclear green tint in AWB, and people observe a magenta tint on the M11, on which I have never used AWB. I stopped using AWB a number of years ago, and any tint issue (magenta or otherwise), should one be noticed, is fixable 100% of the time. It would be even if I were using AWB. Yet here we are on page 52 of Magenta-gate, saying the same things repeatedly. It doesn't look like the AWB instructions included in the raw file will be addressed in any firmware (if Leica even wants to), nor will the raw converter vendors do too much on their profiles. Probably even after 152 pages of this thread.

My preferred converter, Capture One, tends to swing my M11 files more toward the green. Go figure. If we see magenta in our M11 images and don't like it, we can fix it. If we like it, leave it. If we don't see it and others do, but we still like it, great! 

 

 

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[hdmesa]

4 hours ago, Ray Harrison said:

...My preferred converter, Capture One, tends to swing my M11 files more toward the green...

I have only seen the M11's Auto WB favor green tint in C1 when shooting around sunrise/sunset. In midday light, it favors magenta even in C1 (at least where I live and with the kind of outdoor scenes I shoot).

[Ray Harrison]

2 hours ago, hdmesa said:

I have only seen the M11's Auto WB favor green tint in C1 when shooting around sunrise/sunset. In midday light, it favors magenta even in C1 (at least where I live and with the kind of outdoor scenes I shoot).

Not sure what AWB favors since I never use it. Maybe I’ll see what it does here in the Denver area’s midday light, for grins.