The whole Canon flatter colors has been compared/discusssed to
death before. I do believe it's true having used Canons also. The
E-1 in particular and the Fuji DLSR's get skintones that pop more.
"Pop more" doesn't necessarily mean "correct". I liked the way my
E-300 did skin tones (for the most part) so I fiddled with a few of
the picture styles (jpeg shooting) and they now look the same.
I never implied any color accuracy. All cameras and even films usually are going for a look. The point is at the end of the day, the skin tones out of a Fuji S3/S5 camera look better for something like wedding shots or somethign that approximates traditional Fujifilm color than a Canon. Olympus doesn't quite look like FujiFilm but they do their own thing also.
I have seen photographers post processing images on the Canon to achieve this- in the markets where that kind of look is important.
The default with Canon seems more like a Maniquin-
There are "several" defaults for the Canon- which one?
Pretty much all of them.
Now, I don't mean this in a bad way per se, I think it's just a
different look, different purposes. If I was shooting weddings Ill
prefer the e-1/Fuji look. If I was shooting models, Ill probably
prefer the Canon look. This of course, a jpeg out of the camera-
you can tweak that in post (though I don't tend to do post or RAW).
I shoot mostly RAW now- except for my daughter's soccer and quickie
shots around the house. But then I use DPP and one of the picture
styles for the conversion- I get great results at least IMO.
Well yes, you can do it with RAW with any camera. But that's the point- on some cameras, you can just shoot jpeg and be done with it. The color processing I describe is at the jpeg processing level. Raw is raw and you can make it look whatever you want in post (that's more work after the photo is taken. Some like it , enjoy it and works for them- doesn't quite work for me).
The Nikon is interesting here because although I dont' think the
default is too far from Canon in a way, it has the unique feature
of you being able to define your own jpeg curve. I wish Olympus had
that.
Canon sort of has that with their picture styles. 5 built in, 5
more to download and 5 more (I think) that you can make (in breeze
browser) and upload to the camera. So about 15 jpegs curves to
choose from. Not too bad.
Ok I stand partially corrected- Canon
just added this feature when the 30D came out. The 20D still had the issue I was describing, and in fact, Canon
acknowledging it was indeed an issue for many customers, came out with the picture styles.
keep in mind though the picture styles from what I read are no different from the settings you get say in Vivid, Natural, etc. on Olympus (though you get less on Olympus but you still get them). What I describe of the Nikon is different: it's not a setting of contrast, saturation, and so on but the actual jpeg "levels" transform/curves. This is far more sophisticated, and yes, I wish Olympus had it (or Canon, if I had a Canon and used them).
This gives you far more control and you can come up with truly unique "film" looks of yours. The picture styles (or Olympus vivid/natural/etc settings) don't hold a candle to this feature (though they are certainly better than what the 20D used to do).
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Raist3d
Tools/Gui Programmer - vid games industry, photography student
