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M8 sensor: correct capture of color lavender?


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I am an amateur owning M8s since March 2007 and I am also using a Nikon D700 and Leica a D-Lux4. While I really like my M8.2 a lot, I have noticed one phenomenon which I have not yet red of in this forum: from my experience the M8's sensor has trouble to produce a correct capture of the color "lavender". I have tried JPG, RAW, several white balances (including manual with Expodisk), with/without UV/IR filter and several levels of color saturation. The result is always the same. The color captured by the M8's sensor is always more of a blue; whereas both, Nikon D700 and D-Lux4 are capturing "lavender" correctly. I am curious whether other M8 users have made a similar experience or is it me making a mistake?

 

Regards

 

Jürgen

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I am an amateur owning M8s since March 2007 and I am also using a Nikon D700 and Leica a D-Lux4. While I really like my M8.2 a lot, I have noticed one phenomenon which I have not yet red of in this forum: from my experience the M8's sensor has trouble to produce a correct capture of the color "lavender". I have tried JPG, RAW, several white balances (including manual with Expodisk), with/without UV/IR filter and several levels of color saturation. The result is always the same. The color captured by the M8's sensor is always more of a blue; whereas both, Nikon D700 and D-Lux4 are capturing "lavender" correctly. I am curious whether other M8 users have made a similar experience or is it me making a mistake?

 

Regards

 

Jürgen

 

For what it is worth, when I photographed some clematis blooms of that colour, using an old Summaron lens, it rendered them as pink. The 50mm ASPH Summilux is more accurate on the M8 than was the older non-ASPH which I used to have.

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Please find the attached. Two examples: first D-lux4 - second M8. Not very sophisticated. Just RWL and DNG and ACR conversion, no other PP. M8 taken with 75 lux @ f1.4

 

JAAPV: you are correct: difference in color is most obvious with in-camera jpg - but also after RAW conversion - as you can see from the below.

 

"True" color of the flowers is as captured with D-lux4.

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For what it is worth, when I photographed some clematis blooms of that colour, using an old Summaron lens, it rendered them as pink. The 50mm ASPH Summilux is more accurate on the M8 than was the older non-ASPH which I used to have.

 

I made the same experience: clematis were captured by the M8 totally different.

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The M8 image is one stop underexposed, and assuming the background is neutral, the colour balance seems to be off too. Hard to compare that way.What profile did you use in C1? Having said that, it seems to be a bit lacking in magentas and reds. Can you upload a RAW file on yousendit? I did a bit of playing around on your jpg. It looks a bit overcooked now, one really needs RAW, but I think the colour can be obtained in PS. Maybe I overdid it slightly.

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The M8 image is one stop underexposed, and assuming the background is neutral, the colour balance seems to be off too. Hard to compare that way.What profile did you use in C1? Having said that, it seems to be a bit lacking in magentas and reds. Can you upload a RAW file on yousendit? I did a bit of playing around on your jpg. It looks a bit overcooked now, one really needs RAW, but I think the colour can be obtained in PS. Maybe I overdid it slightly.

 

Thanks for your help and advice. Didn't try C1 vs ACR yet. Tried several WB in-camera and in post processing alternatively, though, which didn't change the result much. I may also have some more extreme examples with darker tones of this color.

 

Am I a lousy photographer: probably yes.

 

Is this shot underexposed by 0.5-1 stop: also, probably, yes. Can almost everything be tweaked through heavy PP in PS, definitively, yes.

 

The point I was trying to make is that the colur lilac, purple, mauve or whatever the correct translation for the German word "lila" is, does not seem to exist for the M8 sensor. Its approximation for this color is "blue". And at least one reader of this post has experienced the same. Frankly, I would not expect by using a 5k € camery to heavily invest time with post processing to get a color back to the way we perceive it every day when walking through mother nature.

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Well, actually it took all of 20 seconds to correct :o It was not heavy processing, I adjusted the exposure in ACR, eyedropper tool on the background for WB, and just tweaked the curve in the "a" channel of LAB mode.

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{snipped}

The point I was trying to make is that the colur lilac, purple, mauve or whatever the correct translation for the German word "lila" is, does not seem to exist for the M8 sensor. Its approximation for this color is "blue". And at least one reader of this post has experienced the same. Frankly, I would not expect by using a 5k € camery to heavily invest time with post processing to get a color back to the way we perceive it every day when walking through mother nature.

 

You are making a mistake somewhere. Hard to tell where. The M8 is perfectly capable of reproducing all the colours my D3 does. FWIW, no digicam on earth sees colour the way people do.

 

As for more expensive cameras being harder to use than point and shoots, that is often the case, sorry; the results if you know what you're doing are well worth it, however.

 

Try C1--ACR is truly messed up with magenta.

 

PS--a 5 second adjust in PS will give you the color you want. Open a levels layer, take the gray picker and click the background. Adjust the whitepoint till the exposure is ok, and voila--lilac.

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This colour looks OK to me, one of my first over 2 years ago once I got the IR filter for my 28 elmarit. DNG processed in Cap1, daylight white balance.

 

Jeff

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Well, yes - you are right, as always. Lop another 10 secs off the processing time :D;)

 

Well, it took me longer to open the file than fix it :D

 

I strongly suspect--and agree with you--that the exposure and white balance are to blame here (and that ACR / LR seems to just mess up the magenta / green axis on M8 raws).

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Funny. 1 week ago, I made a comparison between the D700 and the M8 because I was tired of hearing some Nikon owner saying that the M8 sensor was crap (on another forum).

 

Conclusion is, you need to use Capture One for the Leica and Capture NX for the Nikon to get accurate colors. If not, the comparison is flawed. It does not make life easier because of course, exposure & sharpening can be very different between these software.

 

Anyway, here are some pictures with lavender color in them, no treatment done at all.

 

First in lightroom, Leica then Nikon. Colors are not really accurate but better for the Nikon.

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Now, the Leica in Capture One and the Nikon in Capture NX2.

 

Except for the exposure, constrast, sharpening and highlights to be different, the color are more close to the reality.

 

P.S : one can get both images to look much closer by moving of few cursors of course but this is not the point here.

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Finally, the D700 in Capture One. Clearly not the best results "out of the box". That's why I'm using NX2 to compare with the M8.

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BTW, my conclusion is that the 2 cameras are very close. And of course, the D700 has wonderful exposure, AWB and AF and high ISOs.

But the Leica seems slightly more detailed (50mm/1.4 ASPH at f/4 or 5.6 vs 60mm/2.8 Micro-Nikkor at the same aperture for instance), maybe more DR but hard to say because of the difference in exposure and Raw converters.

The D700 seems to be better with orange and the M8 with blue, green, yellow and red.

 

Anyway, I prefer the M8 files but I'd like to see Leica get some of the wonderful Nikon features in their next camera. The only reason I do not have a D700 are its size and weight.

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The point I was trying to make is that the colur lilac, purple, mauve or whatever the correct translation for the German word "lila" is, does not seem to exist for the M8 sensor.

This range of colors is notoriously tricky to capture with an RGB sensor. In an RGB color space, these colors are represented as a mixture of red and blue. Naturally occurring shades of violet, on the other hand, are often truly violet, i.e. they reflect light with wavelengths around 400 to 450 nm. This isn’t blue (roughly 450 to 490 nm) and it’s as far from red (630 to 700 nm) as it gets. This is quite different from, say, yellow light that both red- and green-sensitive sensor pixels can see, so you get the desired mixture of red an green directly from the sensor. A typical RGB sensor will see shades of violet as mostly blue, with very little green and even less red mixed in, and this is also true of the sensor in the M8. Telling violet from blue and getting the exact shade correct is difficult and not every raw converter is equally good at it. Blue violets are thus an issue frequently encountered, not just with the M8.

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As Michael says!

 

Bluebells are notorious examples too - it's often tricky to avoid capturing 'purple bells' or 'pink bells' vs the blue that our eyes see.

 

The other thing to watch out for is the RGB histogram my actually clip red/blue even though the overall exposure & b&w histogram may show correct exposure.

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