Getting the colour right on the M11 {split-off thread}

[jaapv]

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It is IR block - you are not supposed to record IR, so they cannot be too strong.  If the images change like you suggest it means that Leica already tweaked the RGB balance to compensate.

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[hmzimelka]

31 minutes ago, jaapv said:

These comments suggest that the M11 suffers from IR contamination. Has anybody tried to use a B+W 486 or other IR block filter on it? - Especially for skin tones under artificial light.

I have a Leica UV/IR 13410 on my Summicron-M 50mm V permanently attached. 

The M11 doesn't need it, in my opinion. It does create a very slight cyan shift but hardly noticeable.

Here is a LINK to a M11 DNG file seen below. My M11's  WB is set from a grey card quite a while ago, out in mid day sun using the Summicron without any filter. I've been shooting like this for quite some time... maybe two years now. My Lightroom defaults are set to read the camera's set WB. 

I've not kept my comparison images between filtered and un filtered. I would have to try that again.

One note I had back then is that it seems my Planar 50mm turns green foliage more yellow than my Summicron. The Planar benefits from the UV/IR while the Summicron doesn't. The biggest reason I'm using the Leica filter with the Summicron is it doesn't cause a slight vignette at f/8, while the B+W 39 1010 UV-Haze MRC does. If I had a regular clear Leica filter I would use that.

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[jaapv]

I was specifically referring to skintones under incandescent light. As skin is an unevenly layered structure ( for instance fat will absorb IR, tissue containing blood will reflect it, at least the hemoglobin will) skin will turn blotchy under high-IR conditions even on a camera that has sufficient filtering for normal circumstances. 

[Alberti]

On 9/13/2024 at 1:15 PM, jaapv said:

These comments suggest that the M11 suffers from IR contamination. Has anybody tried to use a B+W 486 or other IR block filter on it? - Especially for skin tones under artificial light.

The manufacturer suggests it fits up to 60 degrees - it cannot be used for even 35mm lenses (64degrees), so only 40, 50, 75 etc . . . which is too bad.

Quote

Schneider: "from an aperture angle larger than 60°, the color reproduction at the edge of the image tends to lean towards bluish."

 

[jaapv]

It is not very common to use 35 and shorter for portraits.  And it is not Blue - it is Cyan.

[MyLeicaWorld]

Is it me only noticing the colors changed on FW2.1.2 ? More like film ; Kodachrome 25 pro? No purple fringe anymore ..

[MyLeicaWorld]

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Straight from the camera on sunset ..

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[Photoworks]

6 hours ago, MyLeicaWorld said:

Straight from the camera on sunset ..

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It is disappointing that there is no magenta cast

[hdmesa]

On 9/7/2024 at 4:12 PM, lct said:

I don't see any magenta cast here. Just a bit of red oversaturation that i find pleasing in most cases and is easy to adjust in PP anyway so i hope Leica won't change anything to it. The rest is a mere matter of WB and learning curve to set it right.

 

On 9/13/2024 at 5:15 AM, jaapv said:

These comments suggest that the M11 suffers from IR contamination. Has anybody tried to use a B+W 486 or other IR block filter on it? - Especially for skin tones under artificial light.

Agreed. The red over-saturation @lct mentioned is seen in many M11 photos. Magenta tint shift is a byproduct of this. The red over-saturation looks like a textbook case of increased sensor sensitivity to hydrogen alpha infrared light, which is recorded to resulting photos as red light. The M11 photos look very similar to photos from the Canon EOS Ra, which is specifically tuned to be more sensitive to Ha light for astro photography. Canon uses a white balance shift to account for the Ha sensitivity, so daylight photos taken with the Ra look mostly normal but with increased reds and often a magenta tint. Why the magenta tint? Because even with the white balance shift imbedded in the Ra firmware, auto white balance is not designed to account for the extra red light.

Below are two variants of the same RAW file taken with the Ra. On the left, I changed the white balance to account for the extra red light by moving the magenta tint slider very slightly toward green and making the temperature slightly warmer. On the right is the camera's attempt to auto white balance the scene, which doesn't take into account the extra red light. You can see a magenta tint, but you can also more easily see the extra sensitivity to red in the background bokeh, which should be neutral tan. Even on the adjusted image on the left, you can still see the extra hydrogen alpha light in the background, which is recorded by the camera as red.

@hmzimelka, regarding your use of an IR blocking filter on the M11. It greatly depends on the lighting, altitude, time of year, location the photos were taken, etc. I should have more red light at over 5K foot elevation than someone closer to sea level for example. And some scenes reflect more IR light than others. Even at my altitude of ~5.5K feet, daytime photos of landscapes don't always show an obvious over saturation of red, so IR cut filters only make a small difference in many scenarios. 

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Edited September 22, 2024 by hdmesa

[hdmesa]

On 9/13/2024 at 5:26 AM, lct said:

Leica UV/IR filters made for the M8 look too strong on the M11. They reduce magenta and increase cyan, giving images a colder rendition. Not my cup of tea but it does no harm to try. BTW i have no skintone issues with my M11 but i don't use Adobe raw converters.

Like @jaapv said, blocking IR light only serves to make a more accurate photo. However, using an IR cut filter may throw off the white balance of the M11, which has likely been shifted to account for extra IR light hitting the sensor. 

Note that green is the opposite tint to magenta, not cyan. If you see a cyan shift, that is because the temperature is shifted colder at the same time as tint is shifted greener. 

[jaapv]

Yes, but with a high-incidence angle lens an IR filter can cause cyan vignetting 

[hunglephotography]

sharing a bit of my experience as i been using my m11p for few months and i love it so much. 

the color surely has magenta cast especially if you use m11 profile on lightroom. i created a preset to fix it by WB to 5400k and tint around 8-10 which minimize the magenta cast significantly. sometimes it's greenish which makes the color look similar to mp240 which is nice. But yeah, the tint adjustment and absolutely fix it. 

i was disappointed at the beginning but now i love every bit of my m11p. the raw file is nice and powerful for editing. 

i hope this helps your editing process.

[sdk]

On 5/31/2024 at 3:29 AM, LocalHero1953 said:

The ancient Greeks had very few words for colours, and those they had perhaps were used for textures rather than what we call colours: other than black and white, they used 'wine-dark' (the sea, oxen), 'green' (khloros: faces, honey, wood) and 'bronze' (the sky, as well as metallics). They had no word for 'blue': kyanos (our 'cyan') was only used by Homer to describe Zeus's eyebrows. It appears they weren't colour blind, but perhaps colour was not as sophisticated or necessary - or rigid - a concept as it is to us, after a couple of millennia exploiting a multitude of natural and artificial pigments.

Just adding to the debate.........🙂

The Ancient and Classical Greeks have been misunderstood on their appreciation of color. We think of their states as being white marble or green bronze, but researchers discovered that's because the pigments they used to paint them have been weathered off over the millennia. William Gladstone (1809-1898) thought Ancient Greeks could not see blue, which is biologically ignorant of the old statesman. Their statues were elaborately polychromed when they were newly finished. And yes they used a blue (kyanos) pigment, as well as greens, yellows, reds, etc. It's not impossible that statues of Zeus were conventionally painted with blue for his eyebrows at the time of Homer. There are other possibilities. Homer's use of color words is so odd that some scholars think he may have been blind or colorblind, with his purple sheep and wine-dark seas being examples. 

For more on Ancient Greek polychrome statues see: https://allthatsinteresting.com/gods-in-color

[sdk]

If you are serious about color accuracy, custom profiling your camera is what you need to do. I profile all my digital cameras with the Calibrite Color Checker system shooting either the Color Checker Passport target or the Color Checker Digital SG target which has more swatches for greens and many more skin tones for higher precision. Calibrite (formerly Xrite) has a Lightroom Plugin that allows you to export the camera profile from raw images, and then you can make an import preset to apply for each camera. Calibrite even supports shooting the target under two different light conditions and make dual illuminant profiles to automatically handle more than one lighting condition (sun/shade, or sun/tungsten, tungsten/fluorescent, sun/moon, or even two lenses with wildly different color transmission, etc.). Using this system I get very close to identical color performance from my M11, the M-P typ 240 that I am about to sell, my Nikon D850 and the D800E I had before that, and my Ricoh GRIII. I can then tweak color balance as needed per image. I have set my cameras to do 5000K image capture these days rather than using auto WB, not that this means much for DNG or other RAW formats, that is just the color balance the files are tagged with to show at import. I almost never use the built in camera profiles or any of the Adobe camera profiles.

Sure buying profiling targets every couple of years is an expense (they expire as the color of their paint swathes shifts on exposure to air and light), but it's peanuts compared to what you spent on an M11 and lenses. And it will save you aggravation in the long run, so it pays for itself in that regard, by reducing stress, in my opinion.

[Velo-city]

I’m not an M11 user but just curious why Leica (who reading this and other topics here have discussed and are aware of some users experiencing a magenta cast) didn’t just add a firmware option to offset the white balance. It’s a pretty trivial thing to do, and would keep all users happy? If you liked the camera as-is you don’t change it, and if you don’t you adjust the white balance to counter it less magenta. 
win win?

(ignoring the comments about fluctuating AWB between shots. Never seen that on other recent models from other brands)  

 

Edited October 14, 2024 by Velo-city

[sebas_]

Have just noticed that Cobalt has updated their The Base Pack for Adobe - Leica M11-P to version 3.0. I have had V 2.X installed and I do see a positive difference with the 3.0 

[mosh1]

I did some investigation on this and it comes down to how the M11 are individually calibrated at Leica. It's inconsistent and that's also why some people complain about the magenta tint and others don't. More info in link below. Also it's not IR contamination, I shoot a lot of astrophotography and the M11 has about the same hydrogen-alpha sensitivity as other Sony cameras when I tested it, that is very little. My Fuji cameras have a lot more.

 

 

 

[elmars]

There might be some calibration differences. But it also seems to be fact that all M11 are more or less on the magenta side in comparison to other M cameras, other Leicas and cameras of other brands. I had three different M11 models. Tint in Lightroom was always between 20 and 22 at fixed white balance (daylight). A good value in my opinion is 12. 

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[LeicaGuyUK]

On 5/30/2024 at 7:14 PM, jaapv said:

Whilst conceding that appreciation of colour is subjective and individual, I really wonder why some people are still on a standard profile for the M11. I have most of my cameras profiled and tweaked to my taste ( except the M9 and SL601). I would not dream of demanding that a camera maker adapt his settings to my particular preferences when it is such a basic thing to do so myself. 

Curious, do you have or know a link to a procedure for this so i can also make my own profiles? I presume each camera is dfferent (or at least has slight differences with the sensor and potential deviances between each one), that may explain why we all seem to have different levels or magenta...

[jaapv]

https://calibrite.com/photo-target/

https://calibrite.com/product-category/targets/