First DP3Merrill and DP2x shots

Hi all,

Ordered myself a DP3 Merrill two weeks ago after the pricedrop, and at about the same time purchased a mint DP2x, with just 50 clicks on it. Here are a few of the first shots.

Last weekend I had to make photos of artwork made by people with severe aphasia, for promotional benefits. Making art can be a wonderful way of expression for people with severe aphasia. It's a project supported by the Marline Fritzius Foundation in the Netherlands.

DP3 Merrill

DP3 Merrill

DP2x

Nice images and a very good cause that you photographed.  My father had a very severe stroke at age 63 which left him as having survived but with severe aphasia.  He lost what he knew as his life.  The frustration and anger turning into depression that he felt for his remaining years is almost impossible to describe it was so intense.

Really nice, the DP-3M I could see as begin fantastic for preserving artwork.  I take pictures of quilts and I really like how well texture and color are preserved.

I took a  DP2M photo of an artwork, acrylic painting. The jpeg turned out close to true color, but the raw file when put in spp  was washed out and the color balance was way off. It took alot to retrieve it. It was especially difficult to deal with the tan/brown tones on the skin, and then more work in photoshop. I have never experienced this with landscapes in spp.  Can anyone offer an explaination?

Thinking of buying the DP3M and wondering if the color response is that different when photographing colorful artwork, especially portraits like this.

.x3f file  before editing

I checked preferences to see if some previous presets were influencing the result. Negative.

jpeg straight from camera much closer to actual colors.

Accurate reds has always been difficult to reproduce.

Lord metroid wrote:

Accurate reds has always been difficult to reproduce.

A painting like that will be using mainly iron oxide pigments such as the earth colours, and these are always difficult to reproduce with any three-primary system.

Including a grey card in the picture, or a grey step wedge, should help.

Simply mixing black and white acrylic paint will give a good neutral grey. A strip of card painted with such a mixture can be placed alongside the painting.

Images captured by a camera need to be processed and interpreted.  The only way I can do that is to include a reference point in the image.  40 years of B&W film photography I almost never left home without a gray card.  It gave me a reference point in printing.  Turns out that digital is not all that different, just easier.

With digital and the adjustment capabilities of a RAW file I quickly discovered that if I wanted a true representation I needed perfect memory of the colors, which I don't have.  I carry an 18% gray lens cloth.  This gives me a reference point when I process (interpret) what the camera gave me.  I also check my WB often.  This isn't perfect but works for me in most cases.  If you photograph other art work you might try to include a color few known color samples which you can check later against the finished image.

Understand that this isn't a fix for photographing and printing colors perfectly.  Color management is an expensive and complex process / time and money.  My gray card method gets me close.  Also, this method won't work if your intention is to capture the effects of a unique light.  The occasional golden glow that covers everything at sunset for instance, or a subject bathed in a colored light.  The gray card method will attempt to change the light source to white.

Thanks for all your comments. I have never needed a grey card for any of my landscape work, so 2 questions.

Why did the jpeg get the reds right and not the raw file?

Why can i get good reds when photographing flowers and faces(pink shades) and not paints?

I have no idea how the merrill cameras perform as I got a DP2s. However, I usually make a couple of photographs of the same subject one after the other because I know that sometimes the camera simply adds a layer of magenta or cyan all over the photograph.

Just discovered this when I view from the adjustment editing window, as shown above, its brown, but if I save from the review window and save as tiff and open in photoshop its perfect. So its something to do with the SPP software,even tho I think I have all the settings at default.

In SPP Preferences I had selected Prophoto rgb color spaces and that was what was seeing red as brown.Changing it to Adobe rgb helped greatly, but it was even much more accurate when I simply opened it in SPP review and saved directly as a .tif, rather than going into adjustment mode where the preferences kick in. Good to know.

pat scales wrote:

I took a DP2M photo of an artwork, acrylic painting. The jpeg turned out close to true color, but the raw file when put in spp was washed out and the color balance was way off. It took alot to retrieve it. It was especially difficult to deal with the tan/brown tones on the skin, and then more work in photoshop. I have never experienced this with landscapes in spp. Can anyone offer an explaination?

There are two problems with the image you are showing:

1) You have the white balance set to sunlight, no way that will work out well.  Even if you were photographing outside you would still select shade unless in direct sunlight (which it was not).  I would start with augo, then try one of the standard presets if that does not work - If you are really serious about photographing artwork I would use a grey card to set a custom white balance.  You should also play with color modes, Neutral I think is best for the the DP cameras (and is not the default, Standard is).

2) From your other message, you are setting the working space to ProPhoto and AdobeRGB.  I have never been able to get either to work myself; many monitors only display the full sRGB space anyway.  Set the working color space to sRGB to judge colors - you can still save in a wider space when you are done in SPP.  Or, you can ignore the colors and just use the histogram while making adjustments, then do final adjustments in some other editor.  Personally I use SPP set to sRGB, but I do most of my editing in Aperture after making first rough adjustments in SPP.

Fransvv wrote:

I think you're right, white balance is important. Usually I get good results with auto white balance but in this case it was a struggle getting the colours right. I then used an Expodisk to make a custom white balance and that solved a lot of colour problems. I guess a grey card basically gets the same result.

The expo disc is just as good, possibly a little better - I have one also.  It's just that bringing a grey card is usually easier and less bulky...

Thanks, Kendall, for your input.

1)I played with all the settings, but it wasn't until I changed the color space in preferences that anything really significant happened.

2) Went back and changed color space to srgb(by the way i'm on a Mac and am used to using adobe rgb1998) and found the most accurate representation for this particular piece was sunlight and portrait. Neutral was a bit bland but could be worked with. But in the end, skipping adustment in SPP and saving directly to tif was the most accurate. Its weird though because I have been using photo pro for landscape and having good luck in SPP. Go figure! Good learning here on this anyway. (-: