Re: Canon EOS R6 colors vs older Canon cameras
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Canon has been experimenting a lot with its "Signature colors" and quite frankly the "Canon colors" do no longer exist. It's a thing of the past and has been for quite some time. If you used to define Canon colors as "realistic but very vivid" that is.
I've been shooting Canon and pretty much all models starting with the original 5D and I have seen colors loose their "vibe and soul" over the years. I think it started when they fell behind in sensor tech and went hunting for noise. Noone mentioned color rendition in reviews back then - only high ISO performance and low ISO DR and Canon was seriosuly bashed for their crappy DR. So they did something with the sensor filters and opened Pandoras colorbox if you ask me. And the crushed blacks are very common these days. They are really keeping the doors to those shadows closed.
Then you have the lenses. I have been a 100% canon system shooter and never bothered with any other lenses. Until I tried both Tamron and Sigma a couple of years ago and noticed something I haven't seen in a long time. The warmer rendering from those lenses really did improve the colors. Especially when adding a subtle warming filter on top of that, like a Skylight 1B. Brings back some of those warm reddish hues Canon used to have. It's subtle but noticeable if you are anal about colors :-).
It's sad really. Canon used to be number one in the color department 10-15 years ago but now I would take any other brand instead of Canon for color alone. Well, maybe not any other but I would rank Olympus as the king of warm almost nostalgic rich color rendition followed by Pentax, Panasonic, Fujifilm. I still think Canon looks better than Sony but then again...even Sony looks more "alive" out of camera.
The old saying "it's just RAW, it is supposed to be flat" is extremely dated. Everyone needs to save time and why should I spend time steering colors to their correct starting position when they should look right in the first place from a modern sensor and RAW algorithms.
Yes, you can make your Canon R6 files look downright awesome but it still requires more work compared to for example Olympus. For me the solution is other lenses (and sometimes warming filters) since I want the right hues on the sensor directly and not alter everything in post. YMMV