----- Original Message ----- From: "James B. Davis" : I dunno what you guys are talking about with Canon having poor colour? : Hell, tweak the RAW files to whatever you want... If skin tones are red and blothcy, mauves are showing blue, reds tinted yellow, effectively a lousy colour situation where curves are crossed in all directions then tweaking a raw file is not the answer. Sure if there is a colour cast in one direction RAW processing can eliminate that, but subtle and varied colour shifts in all directions are not so easily fixed. Not saying the Canon is THAT bad though! When I was last working with a guy from the museum who shot for the herbarium he came to me one day really confused. He'd moved to digital and had been more than happy with the transition but after a few years he found himself doing what all people in his area do, referring back to the photos for one reason or another and he found colours were NOT as he'd expected them. calibration wasn't the answer, and he found himself feeling less and less confident with his output. He put it down to a gut feeling but in the end we had a talk and he confessed that certain cameras had proved better for certain colours than others. I suggested that IF he was going to stay digital, he might want to consider resurrecting some of the discarded, low res cameras and shoot his way through the range to find which performed best for differing subjects. A number of weeks later he came back a little happier - he'd found the particular cameras which rendered colour best for each intent and had resumed shooting with them, though he was annoyed that it meant he had a couple of bodies of both Nikon AND Canon cameras for varied shoots. I had to do some UV photos to prove a manufacturing fault had caused a rather expensive machine to fail, showing the cracks originated from inside the particular part rather than from vandalism as claimed by the manufacturer. I had to turn to a rather clunky battery eating Nikon 1.2 Mp SLR camera (model number forgotten) to get the job done properly - none of the newer cameras rendered UV shots anyehere near as well or with the fine colour seperation. The company folded within 2 weeks of getting the images sent to them :-( The Sony has a neat-O trick of removing the IR filter from in front of the sensor with the flick of a switch for IR shots - it's results are far better than any professional SLR I've tried. Each camera has it's own colour traits, as film does. the difference is you're stuck with what you've got with a digital. Remember printing cross processed images, where you tried to hit the mid point between the crossing of the curves? Nice effect and a lot better than the dreadful yellow/green efforts of those not experienced with printing CP images... Imagine trying to recompile a cross processed image back to the original 'correct' colours - it's no where near that bad but when the colours are off, they're off.. Precision stuff, colour-wise, like geology, medical, scientific etc type photography is *still* having issues with digital colour k
