Old Skin Tone Formula vs Today's Skin Tone Formula

absquatulate wrote:

Erik Baumgartner wrote:

absquatulate wrote:

Erik Baumgartner wrote:

absquatulate wrote:

Erik Baumgartner wrote:

While the SOOC jpeg results do vary a bit from generation to generation, It doesn't look the film sims themselves change much, but some of the ancillary processing does. With some tweaking of the jpeg settings (saturation, highlights, shadows etc) you should be able to get close. Even more important, you may have to play with the Auto-WB shift and Exposure Compensation to really dial in the look.

With RAW files, the Camera matching profiles (in Lightroom, anyway) can vary significantly from from one model camera to another (the X-T3 being more different than the others). Any of them can be tweaked and saved as a new profile to closely match any of the other camera/profile combos with a little know-how. If you want your X-H1 (or whatever) files to look more like what you get with your older cameras, it's absolutely doable - especially if you're just try to match another Fuji.

If you can make a Sony look like a Fuji, you can make one Fuji look like another Fuji.

A Sony RAW with a custom profile to match the X-T2 (Classic Chrome)

They don't look the same to me, the Fuji profile has more vibrant colour.

Close enough, nothing a tiny slider tweak wouldn’t take care of. If you shot this scene a couple of years apart with two Fuji cameras it wouldn’t look exactly the same either.

Personally I don't buy it, all different sensors have a different colour response, you may get close, but there are always differences, especially when you start shooting in the real world, as opposed to consistent controlled studio lighting.

I've processed Fuji and Sony files shot together from a wedding in all sorts of mixed lighting and they were very close - close enough that no one would ever notice that they weren't shot with a single camera.

Low incandescent light, very high ISO and still in the ballpark.

I can easily spot a difference,

Well, I can spot a difference too - not especially surprising as this is an APS-C camera vs. a full-frame camera at ISO 12800. but they still could easily have come from the same camera (IMO).

I can easily spot bigger differences between the X-T3 and X-T4 at base ISO with the same profile.

normal people don't care about such things, they're happy with a smartphone. The point really is that, as I said previously, different sensors render colour differently, some dramatically so, others not so much. Ultimately it's pointless buying a brand to try and make it look like another, just stick to the one you like and save yourself the pain of this fruitless task. Colour is always a subjective, and consequently a controversial topic, because we all see colours slightly differently anyway, and have our own bias for certain hues, in my experience, even cameras from the same brand are different, this thread pretty much proves the point.

In my experience, with the right custom profiles, RAW files from almost any camera can be made to look pretty much however you want them to, right from the get-go - including if you want them to all look like the Fuji Provia sim (or whatever you prefer). Whether I'm shooting with a Fuji, a Sony, or a Nikon, I made simple custom matching profiles for each that deliver great and consistent looking results from any of them - not to match any particular camera, just to deliver the color I want. There isn’t inherently wrong with Sony’s RAW color potential (Sony makes Fuji’s sensors) but, for whatever reason, most of Adobe's greenish/yellowish Sony profiles look pretty awful to my eye and are best avoided entirely.