RAW Image Color Differences

[inTempus]

This topic is killing me. Use your manufacturers software to get accurate color. Period.

Why?

You can get outstanding color, and it looks just like the manufacturers, if you know how to properly use the tool (like Lightroom).

I see no reason to limit yourself with the rather crappy OEM software. Just learn how to use the 3rd party applications properly as they typically offer more robust tools.

By 3rd party I mean Lightroom, ACR, or even Capture One Pro.

 

[itznfb]

This topic is killing me. Use your manufacturers software to get accurate color. Period.

Why?

You can get outstanding color, and it looks just like the manufacturers, if you know how to properly use the tool (like Lightroom).

I see no reason to limit yourself with the rather crappy OEM software. Just learn how to use the 3rd party applications properly as they typically offer more robust tools.

By 3rd party I mean Lightroom, ACR, or even Capture One Pro.

I've never used Canon's software but Nikon's Capture NX2 isn't crappy by any means. I've never seen anyone that could provide the right adjustments for Camera RAW including the preset ones you can download from various photogs and manufacturers that accurately render the image like Capture NX2 does out of the box. If I need to do more indepth editing with layers or something then I'll just export the tiff to Photoshop.

As I've said in other threads I spent years working with Photoshop just because I assumed it was better than Capture NX2. When I finally decided to make the jump it was the biggest single improvement to my end result.

 

[inTempus]

Yeah, NX2 might be in a different league. DPP is rather limited in functionality. It's great for NR, but everything else is kind of clunky and not all that intuitive. Nikon charges $200 for NX2 (a little less than Lightroom) which means I would expect more from it.

DPP is free and ships with every Canon. I much prefer Lightroom as it's a great tool for not only importing RAWs but for building a library of images and doing other workflow management.

 

[Vautrin]

This topic is killing me. Use your manufacturers software to get accurate color. Period.

You should see the skin tones my olympus evolt 510 creates under flourescent lights. with default white balance people look yellow. nice if you're photgraphing the simpsons, but not so nice otherwise

 

[itznfb]

Yeah, NX2 might be in a different league. DPP is rather limited in functionality. It's great for NR, but everything else is kind of clunky and not all that intuitive. Nikon charges $200 for NX2 (a little less than Lightroom) which means I would expect more from it.

DPP is free and ships with every Canon. I much prefer Lightroom as it's a great tool for not only importing RAWs but for building a library of images and doing other workflow management.

You're right that it costs too much for what you get, no argument there. It's worth it for me though. I like the out of the box color accuracy. Obviously you can get good color from PS/LR if you know what you're doing with the color profiles. But I actually dislike the post process and want it as easy as possible.

 

[Garbz]

This topic is killing me. Use your manufacturers software to get accurate color. Period.

It is widely known that Canons, Nikons, Leicas, Sonys, etc take very different pictures both in colour and tonality. If you think your camera manufacturer produces accurate colours then you should ask yourself what is accurate? After all my D200 allows me to take 5 different colour interpretations sRGB Mode I, sRGB Mode III, AdobeRGB Mode I, AdobeRGB Mode II, AdobeRGB Mode III. You take 5 images of the same colour checker chart you'll get 5 very different results (and on my camera every result will have a light blue that's way too purple!)

I haven't used Lightroom yet, but I use Adobe Camera Raw. When I bring a file into ACR, I can set the picture mode (i think its called) to a Canon preset, like Canon Faithful. Isn't that what she wants, to call up her camera's preset? Doesn't LR have presets for her camera type or aren't they downloadable?

This is slightly different to what everyone is talking about I think. This will cause the colour profile to emulate the camera, but only from colour and tone. What I was referring to is the ability for the software to automatically realise your camera was set to Portrait mode and load the required settings, or realise that you had sharpness set to +2 and load that as the default when you import. Only the manufacturer's converter does it that I know of.

But by all means these tools are there to emulate base settings of your camera. Use them, set them as presets or defaults. Heck make your own profile, that's the whole point of all this RAW power (pun definitely intended) .