Does “Color Science” even matter?

paratom wrote:

DMillier wrote:

Dan Cook wrote:

I bought a pair Sony A9 for all their technical capability when I made a career change into full time photography.

I fought it's raw colour output for years creating preset after preset, until I found a third party colour profile which helped, but not long after..

..I bought a pair of Sony A1's and except for a colour inconsistency between 70-200 & 24-70, I am happy.

But the first time I loaded up a Hasselblad X1D raw portrait, I was amazed by the colour presented to me, so much so it made it difficult to know where to start processing because I felt like I can only make it worse. I've since had X1D II, 907X and the X2D - just love the raw.

And now, even if I'm going to change colours considerably, I still prefer having a great base to work from.

But if we are talking about raw files, you are still talking about the difference in the raw software, not the camera/sensor. It's possible there are some subtle differences in the CFA on different sensors (that special Phase One camera for example where they concentrated on tweaking the CFA dyes) but mostly the colour is determined by the raw software. As some people have said, you don't have to use the canned camera profiles, you can make your own custom profiles and tweak the colours to be anything you want.

I think its wishfull thinking that you can tweak a raw file from any camera to any (color) look.

No, I don't think it is so, in general.

For example if you use a camera with 16-bit color depth instead of 14, you get 64 times more color tones.

Well, that is pure nonsense. Cameras cannot differentiate 64 000 colors per channel, the real number may be closer to 250 colors per channels.

if you feed raw files from different brands cameras to lightroom, the output will still look somewhat different. You can spend hours to try to make them look similar. Sometimes one will be successfull, sometimes not.

That may depend on the color profiles used. The examples below compare Pentax 645Z (left) and Sony A7rIV (right) to the GFX 50S, based on DPReviews studio test scene, using profiles generated by Lumariver Profile Designer. The colors are virtually identical between the three.

No visible differences comparing GFX 50S/Pentax 645Z or GFX50S/Sony A7rIV

The numbers tell the same story.

Comparing same cameras, Hasselad X1D added, with reference data indicates significant errors:

From left: Pentax 645Z, Fujifilm GFX 50S, Hasselblad X1D, Sony A7rIV

So, all sensors have some reproduction errors, but they all seem to have similar reproduction errors.

https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/63281139

Best regards

Erik