LCD more saturated than real picture?

OutsideTheMatrix wrote:

Uniqumm wrote:

OutsideTheMatrix wrote:

Danielvr wrote:

See page 71 of the manual . You can adjust the brightness and color temperature of the LCD screen and, what's more important, you can switch it between natural and vivid display modes (note: this is separate from the natural and vivid picture modes that affect your actual JPGs). So, hopefully it will turn out that your LCD was set to Vivid and you can get more accurate colors by switching to Natural.
Obviously, in the end it's important that your images look good on your (and other people's) computer screens, but it would be nice if they looked similar to that on the camera's LCD.

Oh I hadn't seen that before! Is the camera LCD set to saturate by default?

So maybe vivid LCD + vivid picture mode was too much?

You could say that your trying to integrate or reconcile several different 'color spaces' to be consistent with each other. To start with, you have "reality". That's one of the wildest, and worst, non-standards. It can change and shift in innumerable ways. The other biggie is the observer of said reality. That's an even more variable platform. The rest are easier to adjust, usually!'

I've been wrestling with this in various ways on various devices over the years, many years. Not everyone sees things the same way. If anything, no one sees things exactly the same way. Decades ago a good friend was house-sitting and invited me to enjoy the sunshine outside the City. Her friends had this BIG Mitsubishi TV set in the LR. The faces were mostly green. After a couple of days I reasoned that contrary to her impressions of the situation, her friends couldn't possibly want it that way. After some effort, I set the colors to very close to what they should be. She wasn't happy, but she had enough faith in me. When they returned, I heard she worried. They saw the TV and asked "What happened to the color???" When she explained, they were ecstatic! They had thought of chucking it and buying a new one (this set had been expensive!). They were very happy!

To get to your query, start with your monitor. If you can't or won't use a calibration system, use known good photos from preferably good Nikons, especially nature shots, but good portraits too*. The lighting has to in prime daylight. Nikons perform very well in that. Also use color wheels. Look on Wikipedia. Next, see if you need to change he camera's screen, but don't get hung up on that too much early on. A lot of tweaking is in redundant cycles that hopefully converges to an optimum setting. Depending on the manufacturer, you may want to tweak the color parameters for photos. And, I'm not entirely sure that those setting will be in the RAW data, but from what I've seen, that seems to be the case. Others here may be more knowledgeable on this. For months now I've been going through these various tweaks on a Pentax K-50. I use mostly the 'Natural' tone menu, but that needed tuning too, and I'm far from finished, especially with the other color tone menus. Out of the box, I wasn't too happy with the color results and the screen is still giving me pains. All-in-all, it's been an uphill fight. I think I noticed similar results in some other Pentax camera's sample shots. I never had any problems with color in my Nikon J2. A fairly cheap Coolpix wasn't that great on color.

* I know Nikons are good at this, usually slightly better than Canons, I think.

Pentax have a reputation for being oversaturated- is that the case with your camera?

It depends on the Color Image/Color Tone (there is more than one moniker for it) setting. Some (most?) reviews use "Bright" setting. That's very saturated, so I started with "Natural" right off the bat. There are several others. But the colors for it weren't satisfactory either. I discovered a couple of months+ later that there is a slew of parameters for that which can be changed. (I usually start shooting with a camera and read the minutiae of the manual later). Adjusting them can be difficult and tedious for several reasons. First you need reproducible subjects (targets) & lighting, and if you're using a picture of some sort on a monitor you run into the problems of color accuracy along with shooting 3-color images of 3-color subjects and they may not be the same 3 colors, not to mention the problem of pixellation/moire interference. My guess is that the guys at DR use high dot density prints for their test set-ups. I'm gradually tuning the "Portrait" Tone currently. Another problem with tuning the "Hue" parameter is that it's a 3-axial value that's being subjected to a simultaneously single-dimensional shift on all 3.  My first "Natural" settings produced a distressing tendency of magenta and blue hues under some lighting conditions.  It's mostly tamed now, but everything is open to review now and then.  Judging from the in-camera indicator, the "Portrait" mode has strong, even saturation, but I'm not sure yet how true that is.  This all takes time, and there's never enough of that.