RX10 and skin color with photo

[Mina J]

I have read some very good to excellent reviews on the RX10 and a few that had a different opinion. I appreciate that the expert and consumer reviews are out there. I remember a time when we did not have the option we have today to research before we buy. I appreciate all of you and your input because I have learned a lot on this forum. Ultimately, the decision is mine.

I am still learning how to use the RX10 but have taken some photos that I really like. At this stage of the game, that is the most important thing to me. Skin color is also extremely important to me and I have been very pleased with the skin colors from the RX10. This is one of my favorites. I think this is a good example of what the camera can do with a variety of skin colors.

 

[penuel]

Beautiful people take beautiful photos. What more can I say. Enjoy your camera, all the skin tones look great in my opinion.

 

[Mina J]

Thank you so much, you made my day.

 

[peter42y]

The skin tones for me are important also. This is the reason I do not like a certain brand pictures. In my computer screen skin tones of that brand look to redish , as if people were lobsters. In this case this does not happen. Skin tones look fine , indeed. They look great.

 

[Ron AKA]

This is a very nice photo. I suspect you took it with a flash? I find that often a flash give a white balance that is a little too cool (toward the blue), and most often overall colour can be improved by warming it up a bit, especially if it includes skin tones. My feeling was that the lady on the right looked a little too white, especially when you view the original size image. Here is my minor touch up which was just a slight bit warmer and a little closer crop. I find shooting in JPEG and Auto White Balance is a bit of a hit and miss thing. If you shoot RAW and touch up after the fact, you often can make better choices than the camera does.

 

[Mina J]

Looks very good. Thanks for your input. I love what you did with it.

 

[Mina J]

Thank you so very much and thank you for your input.

 

[lancespring]

This is a very nice photo. I suspect you took it with a flash? I find that often a flash give a white balance that is a little too cool (toward the blue), and most often overall colour can be improved by warming it up a bit, especially if it includes skin tones. My feeling was that the lady on the right looked a little too white, especially when you view the original size image. Here is my minor touch up which was just a slight bit warmer and a little closer crop. I find shooting in JPEG and Auto White Balance is a bit of a hit and miss thing. If you shoot RAW and touch up after the fact, you often can make better choices than the camera does.

Mina's photo looks just fine to me on my PC. Your photo gives everyone a very sickly yellow look on their face , like they are suffering from Jaundice. https://www.google.com/search?espv=...u&sa=X&ei=g5wFU-C5DdXmoASRgYGgDQ&ved=0CCgQjRM

 

[lancespring]

I have read some very good to excellent reviews on the RX10 and a few that had a different opinion. I appreciate that the expert and consumer reviews are out there. I remember a time when we did not have the option we have today to research before we buy. I appreciate all of you and your input because I have learned a lot on this forum. Ultimately, the decision is mine.

I am still learning how to use the RX10 but have taken some photos that I really like. At this stage of the game, that is the most important thing to me. Skin color is also extremely important to me and I have been very pleased with the skin colors from the RX10. This is one of my favorites. I think this is a good example of what the camera can do with a variety of skin colors.

performance. The camera knows that it is using flash, and will thus adjust the white balance accordingly.


So this photo really does not speak to the camera's abilities.

.

 

[Mina J]

Hi Lance, you are right about the yellowing in the doctored photo. I appreciated his input but thought my colors were more natural because they were the true colors of the people.

 

[lancespring]

Hi Lance, you are right about the yellowing in the doctored photo. I appreciated his input but thought my colors were more natural because they were the true colors of the people.

I fully agree with you. Your colors look great to me. Most cameras these days do a good job in getting the white balance right when using flash.

Ron's alteration definitely gives a yellow tint to their skin, which looks most unnatural and unflattering to me. And that is why I suspect that his computer's monitor may need to have a color calibration done on it.

.

 

[cchen2]

Dear Mina, I think your colors looked great but I think flash blows things out so it looks less natural. You might next time try bounce flashing by holding a white card at a 45 degree angle in front of the flash so it hits the ceiling first. As long as the ceiling is not super high it will bounce downwards to give a much more natural and even light. Hope you continue to enjoy your camera!

 

[Bill Borne]

[No message]

 

[Ron AKA]

My monitor is calibrated. Is yours? Colour is a personal taste. I like a warmer rather than a colder look for people.

 

[Ron AKA]

Yes, of course you see the real people, and I can only guess. Perhaps the lady on the right has a very pale completion.

 

[Ron AKA]

In my experience in shooting RAW photos I find the auto white balance is frequent off and is much better when corrected, even to the preset defaults. If I could make one recommendation to those shooting JPEG only it would be to use the presets instead of auto.

My daughter wanted me to shoot a portrait for use on line, so I did a hand held available light with no flash. Light was a bit mixed. To get it right I included a WhiBal card in a test shot. See what a JPEG looked like out of the camera with auto white balance see the first shot below. Closed her eyes, but it was only a shot of the card. I used the Adobe Camera RAW eyedropper white balance tool on the WhiBal card. I used that setting to set the white balance on the good shot. The second one below is the final image I settled on. There was no colour correction other than the white balance correction.

The point of this is that the second image reflects Adobe's white balance based on the WhiBal card, not my eye, or my monitor. To my eye however, the first image is cool, and the second image is right.


OOC Auto White Balance


RAW corrected with WhiBal Card

 

[cchen2]

very nice, much better- I wonder if I should start playing w/ RAW...

 

[Ron AKA]

very nice, much better- I wonder if I should start playing w/ RAW...

If you are going to post process your images, I think shooting RAW is one of the biggest improvements you can make in the quality of your images.

If you are not going to post process then you need to develop strategies to make the JPEG as good as you can get. My experience in doing post processing is that you can almost always improve the image by making a change to white balance. Many times I just change the WB from As Shot (Auto White Balance) to Daylight, or Shade, or Cloudy. 9/10 times the image improves and I may not even make a tweak to that setting. The message in this is that I believe you can do the same thing in your camera by manually setting WB, although I admit I never took the time to do it. Possibly even better would be to use a WhiBal card to set a custom white balance when you take the shot. Then the JPEG will have much better odds of being correct out of the camera.

I've settled on shooting RAW and then doing the correction after the fact. But, there is the time required to do post processing, and not everyone wants to do that.

 

[Biological_Viewfinder]

My monitor is calibrated. Is yours? Colour is a personal taste. I like a warmer rather than a colder look for people.

Hi Ron, I appreciate what you tried to do there. I just think that the method used to get there wasn't the best one in this case. It does not look like jaundice. But it does not look natural either.

Even with the method that you used however; it could still look more natural and nicer than the original. You would want to use Layer-Masks, and mask your effect to varying degrees especially on grampa's shirt, big sister's dress, and little sister's face, and grandma's face.

Another thing you could do here is to reduce the vibrancy of colors a tad. I mean, things are glowing here because there's so much color.

I like your cropping of the photo.

I can tell you tried to help Ron. And I agree with you for the most part; but the presented result was a bit overcooked. That's all.

 

[Biological_Viewfinder]

very nice, much better- I wonder if I should start playing w/ RAW...

If you are going to post process your images, I think shooting RAW is one of the biggest improvements you can make in the quality of your images.

If you are not going to post process then you need to develop strategies to make the JPEG as good as you can get. My experience in doing post processing is that you can almost always improve the image by making a change to white balance. Many times I just change the WB from As Shot (Auto White Balance) to Daylight, or Shade, or Cloudy. 9/10 times the image improves and I may not even make a tweak to that setting. The message in this is that I believe you can do the same thing in your camera by manually setting WB, although I admit I never took the time to do it. Possibly even better would be to use a WhiBal card to set a custom white balance when you take the shot. Then the JPEG will have much better odds of being correct out of the camera.

I've settled on shooting RAW and then doing the correction after the fact. But, there is the time required to do post processing, and not everyone wants to do that.

I can tell you that I can manage JPEG very well, even when the white-balance was WAAAAAAAAY off. But it is work.

RAW output is different than JPEG output; and I'm not just talking about the bit-depth either.

If a person were to take a RAW + JPEG photograph and process both images; s/he would be hard-pressed to get them to look the same at the end. It would take a very long time, and people would still be able to tell the difference between the two.

From my own experience (over a decade and over a dozen different cameras, 7 of which were DSLRs), I would say that the Sony Rx10 RAW and JPEG are so very different that the output from each process is as if they are coming from different cameras.

In most cases, the ISO noise that Sony incorporates looks MUCH RICHER in Jpeg than it does in RAW where it tends to have the traditional chunky look.

However, in the higher ISO ranges RAW takes the lead away from the JPEG.

The *ONLY* other time I've seen RAW do an easier, better job than JPEG is with snow pictures.

I'm sure that for a RAW processor, it would feel like any picture is easy and fast. But not necessarily better. The Bionz processor that Sony is using to push out the very appealing noise is not as visible in RAW and that leaves RAW behind in most instances.

The JPEG usually comes out fairly close to done when the settings are right. Just a few minor tweaks can really make the picture shine.

Also, I picked up a Sony 43 flash, and Auto WB seems to like it just fine (i.e. it picks flash WB). But not only that, just the overall bounced light makes every image far more ready to be processed.

Anyway Ron, quite a nice read today from your posts.

--
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.