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Leica M11 Magenta shift or Not (with firmware 2.1.1)


JimmyCheng

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So I went out today and took a few shots with my M11 on firmware (2.1.1).

Camera WB was set to daylight throughout the shoot.

Do you guys think the magenta shift is still obvious? (to compare, I've used LR daylight WB on the first photo of each set).

IMO, the LR daylight WB gives us this warm tone which we love to see in our photos these days, but it's a bit inaccurate as well. But the Leica M11 daylight wb is definitely off still. I think I am leaning towards something in the middle. What do you guys think?


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  • JimmyCheng changed the title to Leica M11 Magenta shift or Not (with firmware 2.1.1)

Never seen magenta shift with any M11 firmware so far. Just a bit of red oversaturation. Same feeling under FW I.2.1. I don't use Adobe software though.

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12 minutes ago, lct said:

Never seen magenta shift with any M11 firmware so far. Just a bit of red oversaturation. Same feeling under FW I.2.1. I don't use Adobe software though.

If you see a red bias, that's a white balance magenta Tint bias combined with a white balance Temperature that is on the warmer side of neutral.

@JimmyCheng, I think the consensus is nothing was changed with regard to the M11 in-camera white balance from the day of launch to today. If anything, Adobe might have changed something with Lightroom. 

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1 hour ago, JimmyCheng said:

So I went out today and took a few shots with my M11 on firmware (2.1.1).

Camera WB was set to daylight throughout the shoot.

Do you guys think the magenta shift is still obvious? (to compare, I've used LR daylight WB on the first photo of each set).

IMO, the LR daylight WB gives us this warm tone which we love to see in our photos these days, but it's a bit inaccurate as well. But the Leica M11 daylight wb is definitely off still. I think I am leaning towards something in the middle. What do you guys think?


I think that it is purely a matter of taste. I have yet to see a photograph with "pure" colour

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1 minute ago, hdmesa said:

If you see a red bias, that's a white balance magenta Tint bias combined with a white balance Temperature that is on the warmer side of neutral.

Thank you but it is not my feeling sorry. See a comparo between the M11 color profile and a generic one here (link).

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I think that this whole colour balance hoohah  is much ado about nothing.
Think back to slide film: Kodak reddish, Fuji bluish and Agfa brown-greenish.
And colour negative film? A permanent headache. I had a Kaiser dichroitic colourhead on my enlarger, a Philips colorimeter and still needed a Kodak colour-judging filter set on test strips.  An absolute PITA.

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I don't remember any film showing "accurate" colour.  It was all over the place between different brands, and particularly in different light.

But we didn't complain; just put up with it.

Today's digital colour is fairly adjustable, and inevitably a matter of taste for the photographer. 

But it's never a perfect reproduction of the original scene

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12 hours ago, david strachan said:

I don't remember any film showing "accurate" colour.  It was all over the place between different brands, and particularly in different light.

But we didn't complain; just put up with it.

And a lot of people went after it just for that reason.

Today's digital colour is fairly adjustable, and inevitably a matter of taste for the photographer. 

But it's never a perfect reproduction of the original scene

 

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12 hours ago, david strachan said:

I don't remember any film showing "accurate" colour.  It was all over the place between different brands, and particularly in different light.

But we didn't complain; just put up with it.

Today's digital colour is fairly adjustable, and inevitably a matter of taste for the photographer. 

But it's never a perfect reproduction of the original scene

I discovered something after lots of eye surgeries and dealing with various eye doctors. You don’t see like you think you see. Of five  different people three see different shades of the same colors. When I had the lens implant in the first eye there was a major difference in the colors. An exact representation of a scene or subject is a personal thing. I’ve taken photos that were very close if not right on what I saw and others I couldn’t force to even be close. It is what it is. 

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19 minutes ago, jdlaing said:

I discovered something after lots of eye surgeries and dealing with various eye doctors. You don’t see like you think you see. Of five  different people three see different shades of the same colors. When I had the lens implant in the first eye there was a major difference in the colors. An exact representation of a scene or subject is a personal thing. I’ve taken photos that were very close if not right on what I saw and others I couldn’t force to even be close. It is what it is. 

That's because your brain has a learned color template of what the world should look like, and it will adjust your perception of color back to that template after a short time. Just put on some sunglasses that have a slight color tint, and after a few minutes, everything looks normal again.

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After reviewing the images from my recent European trip, all taken with Auto WB, I must say that almost every image needs WB adjustment. Oh well.

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2 hours ago, jaapv said:

Why don't you make a default import setting then?

As long as they set a fixed WB in camera. Otherwise, the accuracy of Auto WB sometimes is perfect, and other times it’s varying degrees of not perfect, so a preset wouldn’t work well.

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WB is not set by the camera but by the raw converter. If you do not like  the suggestions that the camera maker sends with the raw file or the profiles provided by the conversion software you simply make your own  profiles to your taste and set the most universal one as a default

No two cameras have the same output, it is up to the user  

For me it is standard procedure with any new camera. 

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8 hours ago, hdmesa said:

As long as they set a fixed WB in camera. Otherwise, the accuracy of Auto WB sometimes is perfect, and other times it’s varying degrees of not perfect, so a preset wouldn’t work well.

Just like the eye's perception of color. LOL

 

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The sample pictures posted above are not very well selected to judge color shifts. The mixed lighting situation (direct sunlight and blue influenced shadows), the vibrant colors and the missing of grey tones make it difficult to judge - it is always a matter of taste which image one prefers. However I agree - the LR color interpretation is different from the Leica one - a bit like the difference between Kodacolor Gold and Kodachrome 25 (I hated Kodachrome 25 back in the time and much preferred the more neutral and cooler Ektachrome (which I was able to "warm-tune" with a Skylight Filter in overcast lighting). And yes, I don't think that Leica has changed the color profile of the M11 since firmware 1.6.1 (the first I can judge) - which is good, so I don't need to tune my profiles again.

I recently returned from a trip to Italy with all types of lighting situation. The camera (fw 2.1.1) was fixed on 5.500K and I applied my color cast fixing profile (a midtone dip red and blue tone curves) on all images on import. Of course, I had to adjust the color temperature in Lightroom (especially for dawn/night/artificial light scenes), but I very rarely needed to "play" with the tint slider.

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On 7/7/2024 at 11:38 PM, JimmyCheng said:

I think I am leaning towards something in the middle. What do you guys think?

I agree. Somewhere in the middle looks truer to color, but the warmer tone is pleasant to look at too. 

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