LCD more saturated than real picture?

OutsideTheMatrix wrote:

Uniqumm wrote:

OutsideTheMatrix wrote:

Uniqumm wrote:

OutsideTheMatrix wrote:

Uniqumm wrote:

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.

I was wondering if it shows itself more at higher ISO where you might need to tweak your settings more, say, if you're using higher than ISO 3200?

I haven't noticed much variation of saturation with high ISO shots. But that doesn't mean all is well up there. One early sojourn with the K-50 was on a lush, still wet park path. A woman in a red top approached and I took 2 shots. A check on the screen seemed to show it was good. But, it wasn't. The light was worse than I thought it was, bumping up against the 12.8K limit I put on ISO. Noise was very pronounced. And, the kit 55mm zoom lens made things even worse. It has poor resolution at the high zoom end, found later. The long lens is much better. I changed the ISO limit to 10K afterwards, but I seldom use it. Things go reasonably well up to c. 5K. I had to wait a bit to see those pix just now because Microsoft apparently changed the file structure again, and the RAW files had to be re-"compiled" (That isn't the right word, but I can't think of a better one).

BTW- I wasn't entirely clear in my discussions above. The color settings above apply to color settings for taking pictures, mostly. The color for the 'screen' on the camera is a separate and only partly settled issue. The viewing of photos is on the monitor and that determines how to set the color parameters for taking shots. It's not entirely infallible, but I'm pretty confident it's set to be near calibration, at least. All tests I can perform seem to indicate that. It was a top monitor in it's day.

One thing about Pentax I really like it they use a universal file format for developing RAW- don't they use .DNG? Should make things much easier on the converter.

So if you were examining pictures 1:1 on your monitor, setting the camera to a limit of ISO 5,000 is a reasonable number to keep noise under control?

I'm not sure what you mean by 1:1, but at 4K I have a shot that looks OK at 25" vertical of a landscape orientation. At 6.4K a twilight shot filling the monitor (24" diagonal) is still OK, but you'll notice a bit of graininess if you get close to the screen. I'm not sure what the NR was set to for that shot, but it was probably off. I set a custom NR profile more recently. The noise exhibits somewhat differently in Pentax from some other manufacturers. I'd love to see what the K-1 can do, but that's out of my wallet's reach. After 10K the noise increases rapidly. I was amazed to notice that increasing the exposure just past 1/50th sec. will start registering noise on the metering at -5EV.

As to the file format- Yes they use DNG for this camera. PEF is their proprietary format which they use on some cameras; some can use both formats.

Sounds pretty good still- I suspect ISO 6400 is still nice for 8x10 (if anyone prints anymore.)

I wonder how that camera does for astro/night time photography.

So am I.  I recently took a few shots of some darker parts of the sky, mostly to test the lens (a 50mm f/1.8).  Some prior shots made me suspect lens coma (Is there a Doctor in the house?;-).  But I managed to establish that that isn't the case.  But I haven't quite managed to figure out how to reliably focus either.  AF is useless, especially in this case, and focus peaking didn't quite nail it either.  I learned quite some time ago that it's tough to get a focus on a bright light source, and that may be a factor.  The closest I got to it produced teensy little donuts, and the longer shots had tight streaks (which nixed the "coma" probability).  I also discovered a few pretty big hot pixels.  I think I eliminated those, but time will tell.  If I ever get close to success I may have to learn how to do stacking too.  The "long" kit lens (200 mm) produced reasonably good results of the Moon, but not better than what I've gotten with other ("lesser") cameras.