lens and color

[bribrius]

can anyone expound upon this?


basically, I am hardly ever happy with the color that comes out of one of my lenses. The little 50 mm I tend to like It better. I mostly attributed to Nikon in camera processing engine but new I liked it better In most cases with just the 50mm.

so I didn't give it much thought.
until I was reading through a comment someone left on a store site on a lens they bought in the reviews. They said they "liked the color". you hear about bokeh, sharpness, etc. I get all that . what I cant seem to grasp is this reference to "color"
is it just how fast the lens is or is there something else with the way the lens is made and how the processor picks up on that?

??????????

 

[Josh66]

It's how the lens is made. The way it focuses the light. The entire electromagnetic spectrum does not come into focus at the same point, so how they deal with that will have an effect on the color rendition of the lens.

 

[Derrel]

If you read lens reviews from lens **experts**, like say Bjorn Rorslett, you will see multiple references to lenses and the degree of richness to the color in their images. This is very well-known and DEAD-OBVIOUS to people who have experience with many lenses. For example, the "New G-series Nikkor" lenses have rich, saturated color, and it is fairly neutral. OLD, 1960's-era Nikkors had more muted color in many cases. Some of the thorium-based lenses, like some 35/1.4 Nikkor examples, have slightly radioactive and VERY YELLOW lens elements that give yellowish color cast across the entire frame! For real! I bought one, used, and HATED the yellow color--which by the way was ALWAYS an issue with Sigma lenses made in the 1980's and 1990's: yellowish color, which can not simply be white-balanced away. It's a property of the glass used to make the lenses. sigma for decades looked VERY yellow on Nikon cameras. And again, this can not just be white-balanced away...it's much more pervasive than a simple slider correction. Tokina is "cool", very close to Nikkor's traditional color rendering.

As people who have shot a LOT of lenses know from experience, ED-glass Nikkors tend to produce richer, more-saturated color than lenses that have lower quality. A GREAT example is the Nikkor 135mm f/2.8 Series E lens, compared against the 135/2.8 Ai-S Nikkor...the E-series lens has lower contrast, and wide-open it fairly well sucks. A genuine Nikkor with multi-coated design, not single-coated, delivers more light; it has less light lost to internal reflection, and it's a better lens.

When you look at the "exotic" lenses, like the Nikkor 300/2.8 AF-S Mark II and the 200/2 VR-G, as well as some of the newer but G-series lenses like the Micro~NIKKOR 105mm f/2.8 AF-S VR-G or the 60-D and the 60-G macro models, the color those lenses actually deliver, at a given white balance, at the same exposure, is MUCH more-saturated than many other lenses. The 60mm AF-D is one of the more startling modest lenses. For whatever reason, it delivers **exceptionally** deep, saturated color, compared against the 35/2 AF-D, the 50 1.8, or the 85/1.4 AF-D, or the 105 AF-D D.C. or the 135/2 D.C.. The 60mm AF-D is a macro lens, but I occasionally use it for close-range landscapes, along with "other" lenses...when you see its frames pop up, they are much more-saturated...colors are more-vivid, more-intense, at the SAME degree of exposure by histogram.

Read Bjorn's 100+ individual lens reviews; there are some lenses that deliver very rich, saturated, vibrant color. ANd look up the 60mm G and the 105mm G-series and look at the images those make: it's an odd (to me) degree of hyperrealistic, high-saturation, ultra-crispy image "look"...I'm actually not that fond of them or their rendering characteristics...the color looks artificially "juiced".

 

[bribrius]

thanks, that is kind of what is on my mind is I am not really a fan of the fake looking color. real is rich is good. Fake and plastic not so much..

 

[Derrel]

Today, many people "jazz up" their color by increasing saturation, vibrance, and mid-tone contrast by using the handy-dandy clarity slider...but still, the way a lens images natively varies from lens to lens. Take a look at the 60mm Nikkor samples--oddly they do not break this down and identify G or D-series, but just look here at a few pages' worth of samples from the 60mm Nikkor: Full-size sample photos from Nikon 60mm F/2.8

Then look thru 5 to 10 pages of the 55mm f/3.5 Micro-Nikkor macro lens that was premiered 30+ years earlier...Full-size sample photos from Nikon 55mm F/3.5