… Sigma and Wabi Sabi

Hi Vitee

I had a look at one of your (outdoor) Sd14 galleries. You did a good job managing the colours to keep things looking neutral. However, some of the green foliage is distinctly biased towards yellow, even when you have a nice blue sky.

That is my issue with my SD9 and my SD14. Often, no matter what you do to achieve an overall good looking white balance, still somewhere in the image, there is a shift towards a slightly sickly yellow/green.

Perhaps it's a matter of taste (Laurence used to argue that is what the colours really look like), but it has never been to my taste.

I went down the route of creating custom DNG profiles to try and get a balance I liked. I ended up with a dozen different profiles under different lighting and times of the day. Sometimes they would work to get a colour balance I liked, sometime not. The SD9 is a particular problem because it does the yellow cast thing to extreme, especially if the lighting is particularly warm. My SD14 is more greenish-yellow.

Looking through my files, I note that the DP1 produced much more balanced colours and gave that "crystalline" look to the files that make Foveon stand out from the crowd. However, that camera had a tendency to turn reds to magenta on occasion.  The DP2M colours are better again. In fact, I like the DP2M look a lot. It sometimes went insane and turned reds into a dayglo textureless mess, but mostly it was predictable without having to take any complicated workflow.

I have no idea why Foveon colour performance has always been so variable across camera models, I can only assume it is very difficult to get right and Sigma have worked hard to fine tune it across cameras with mixed results.

I think the biggest problem with Foveon colour is the inconsistency. Sometimes you see superb images that really demonstrate what Foveon is about, then other times it is a bit sad.  I don't know if this is uncontrollable hardware/software/lighting variation or a particular demonstration of skill by the photographer.

What I do know is I value consistency more than moments of exceptional brilliance. YMMV.

Cheers

Dave