I travel extensively throughout the Pacific. My Sony cameras never get the warm caramel tone complexions of Pacific Islanders correct. The color is always biased towards too much magenta. Changing the white balance in post moves the bias from too much "red" to too much "amber." The only way I get the skin color correct is to adjust the hue and luminance settings of individual colors.

Rather than sell your cameras, why didn't you just use a different RAW converter, take 30 seconds to make a Colorchecker profile, or make a custom RAW profile? A few clicks gets you flawless color and skintones.

Canons lean green, Nikon/Sony tend to lean slightly red - in both cases you will need to find a solution if they are not to your taste. Thankfully it's extremely easy to correct either way. I find the skintones on my D850 to need zero correction but everyone is a little different.

Baba, I live on both sides of the Pacific.

I really like Nikons bodies but the skin tones are way off. It is not a WB thing as it seems you have noticed also.

DualSystemGuy,

RAW converter didnt help. Its baked into the RAW.
I have tested the D850 and imo is the best camera ever made. But, skin tones are still way off, with that odd mask. D7500, D500, D850 are better than previous colour science though. There is a ylw tint now, not pretty.

I have never found anything remotely 30sec click fix for Nikon skin tones. It was easier on my sanity to sell them. Sadly.

Canon nails Asian skin near perfectly, objectively. As well as pleasing, subjectively. Their cameras are not as good as Nikon though.
Nikon does well with white, white people and flash. The issue is not WB. Fixing one hue messes with another.

Hi Steve - it's actually not baked into the RAW, the very definition of a RAW file shows that is in fact not true. Most RAW converters allow you to make custom profiles as well where you can slightly desaturate the red (Nikon) or Green (Canon) channels if desired. I prefer using a Colorchecker though.

A Colorchecker Passport will fix your skin-tones in 30 seconds and it's dead simple to use. If you don't own one already I highly recommend it regardless of what you shoot.

Canons put a green cast in skin tones regardless of the ethnicity, so I would argue it is still subjective rather than objective. Regardless, you can correct it using a Colorchecker if you wish so it's a non-issue in either case.

The D850 is the first camera I've owned that does not require correction for skintones - I still use a Colorchecker and there is no visible difference between the Colorchecker profile and no profile which gives me peace of mind. Everyone has different tastes though, YMMV of course :)

In a month in the Nikon forums(where people are very good at PP unlike the Canon forums) I never found anything to make Asian skin tones correct.

Also, ylw bikini, white skin. You get one or the other correct. Never both without a serious amount of individual hue sliding.

Canon OTOH is very close to natural on both.

I have models on my deck, with a calibrated display 5ft from the shoot. Every single model chose the Canon file as most natural.

There are certainly colour differences in different RAW converters, but the colours are affected by CFA which is before the RAW = baked in right?

This corrected profile you have, can you send it to me to test please?

The way the Colorcheckr works is you take a photo of the Colorchecker itself under the lighting conditions you are shooting in, and make a profile based off that (in your case it sounds like maybe a studio where they actually work best), so unfortunately my profiles wouldn't help you unless we were shooting under identical conditions. That is the beauty of the Colorchecker though, you can make as many or as few profiles as you want for a variety of conditions and equipment.

Regardless of what CFA is in front of the sensor, the data from a RAW file is still just that - RAW. It includes ALL captured data, and can still be manipulated in any way, including to remove any color casts one way or the other. Again, this is where the Colorcheker comes in - it can make two cameras from two brands have identical looking output, which is very useful for, say, a team of photographers who uses different brands and then pools their images afterwards.

I can see how that could work. An advanced 18% grey card basically.

I have never seen a colour corrected Canon and Nikon that looked the same though. Hue wise.

I am very cautiously excited this may work. I spent 2 separate months in the Nikon/Canon forums diligently attempting all supposed fixes. They never worked. In camera profiles, Converter profiles, etc...

I will get a D7500 to test against my 7Dm2.

Just to confirm, this will not work in camera for jpg output?

That's actually quite a good point, Karroly -- though then you really get into it, if you do more than as you say, engage the local brand of dynamic range enhancer, or perhaps even that.

It could be a good deal of trouble to 'tune up' each individual camera even a little -- and then to what look?

Before even going there, I remember how varied one may see preferences in the world. The 'greenish' that is often criticized goes with Asian skins, while the touted Canon look is more than a bit like the amplifications of American Kodachrome in its day.

I remember seeing an entire film, a very interesting one in fact, a drama of The White Ship, if I remember, from the Kirghiz, where the light had nearly haloes around everything, a kind of dreamy texture which also infiltrated the colors.

And this is not unlike the look favored for postcards and the like in Korea when I lived there, as it was just beginning to recover from the war. A very fine time, very involving, and I was involved....

It's always a problematic question for reviewers how to show off a camera's output with regards to post processing. OTOH it seems logical to just use OOC jpegs.

OTOH, though, that's not necessarily showing off the capabilities of the camera or the way most would use it.

But OTOH, if one does post processing then as a reviewer it leaves one open to the charge that the PP choices of the reviewer is either artificially inflating or deflating the capabilities of the camera.

Also, as noted by Karroly, even if a pro is using OOC jpegs, as is actually often the case with the D6 type of camera, they usually fine tune the jpeg engine in camera for their best results.

So there's no easy solution.

NarrBL,
"It could be a good deal of trouble to 'tune up' each individual camera even a little"
No easy, but not a big deal, too. Certainly much easier than setting various profiles for various cameras in a RAW editor...

" -- and then to what look?"
The look I prefer ! I am not a pro, so I do not have to satisfy a client. Only me ! ;-)

SteveAnderson,
"There are hardly any real adjustments anyways. +- large increments of contrast and saturation. WB +-."
Then you should read your camera manual ;-)
Recent advanced cameras have much more settings : like advanced sharpening settings (amount, radius and threshold), shadow and highlight curves, Auto D-lighting (or similar), highlight protection, high ISO noise reduction levels, etc. Pentax cameras also have the possibility to set a noise reduction level for each ISO step !

"You can never over ride the colour science of the model in jpg"
But there are several "models" in a camera. They are called "picture mode" or "picture wizard" with settings like natural, portrait, landscape, vivid, faithful, etc... and if you look at the color rendition, they are all a little bit different...

@Barney, one approves of the Cat photos. Thank you old bean.

I'm just happy someone is happy, to be honest!

just remember, it's the mostly silent ones who are most happy :)

D5 and D6 are Identical.

See: https://www.photonstophotos.net/Charts/PDR.htm

so basically in 4 years they did not do the only thing that was necessary to take care of. Running thin on R&D Nikon? One more stab a DSLRs.

Too bad you don't understand WHY people buy a D5 or D6.

It is NOT to shoot at base ISO.

Not

But please tell me of another camera that is BETTER at high ISO ...

You're like a soccer mom who would complain that the racing car she reviewed doesn't have room for groceries and multiple baby seats.

@PerfectPoms
I know exactly who buys the D5 or D6, as I am a sport photographer myself. There are far more situations where you need better DR at 100 iso than a hair splitting better performance at 50K ISO.
Considering what you are shooting with you should know better, but you are probably too hardcore Nikon fan to admit it.
So much outdoors sport in harsh light where the D5 just does not cut it.
Just saying

Well, yes, the D6 could be considered the superior glamping camera from Nikon.

Sara, you’re really into cameras!

A Fiat Uno will take you from one place to another just like a Lamborghini Diablo.

Sara:

Try shooting the D3500 at ISO 28800 and see the difference.

Barney:

To be fair to Sara, except for the high ISO samples, none of these samples really set this camera apart from what a D3500, with a good lens, can do.

And Sara's question was about these samples not D6 specifications versus D3500 specifications.

"none of these samples really set this camera apart from what a D3500, with a good lens, can do"

How could they possibly? This is a gallery of sample images from a 20MP camera - it's not a camera test.

"How could they possibly? This is a gallery of sample images from a 20MP camera - it's not a camera test."

Exactly. What is the point of having these images, then?
Most of those images could have been taken with a MFT camera and you wouldn't see a difference.
Not trying to be mean, but I don't see the value.

The value is in showing what the D6's image quality is like, in a variety of situations. Genuine question - what would you prefer to see in a sample gallery?

The D6 is superior to the D3500 in terms of image quality in terms of
- high ISO DR
- high ISO colors
- AWB at all ISO
- jpg image quality

Cheers,
Bernard

No it's called a 'mistake'. Your comment has now been approved. Nothing was edited (notwithstanding the fact that you made the exact same point as me, in an earlier comment).

I guess if you have to ask, then the D3500 probably a better option for you and D6 is not.

Sara, the D6's photos of fast moving subjects will be in focus.

the single digit bodies are very loud. I dont shoot at CH ever. I always shoot at CL at 2-4 frames at a time, depending what it is. family portraits always 2-3 each time so I get as little as I can with eyes closed. there is a rhythm with people and getting all eyes open together

those who want the large bodies will buy it no matter what others think, im past buying these though. I use my above 2. but I do want to add 2 d780, but no grip is a big no no. I need the bigger body. once I started shooting with the large bodies, nothing else can cut it

I gotta assume you're havin fun/bein sarcastic - because I've thought about taking pics at demos - and there is NO WAY I'd take one of my D5's or my D6 into a pit of insanity.

I'd take one of my old cameras that I don't use anymore ...

It's hardly been a 'pit of insanity' in Seattle at any point (despite what you may have seen on a certain couple of 'news' channels) and in fact there have been no major demonstrations in recent days.

That notwithstanding, I'm not accredited news media, I'm not a trained photojournalist, and I wouldn't feel comfortable shoving a massive DSLR into people's faces just to fill a sample gallery with what some here consider 'camera appropriate images'. This gallery is intended to judge IQ, and contains a range of images taken in all kinds of different lighting conditions, with skin-tones, organic and nonorganic textures and all the rest. Hopefully you can still learn something from it and I didn't completely waste my (mostly free) time :)

Not needed by you, not everyone! It's not a waste of money, if you have the money to spend, but it is a moose of a camera and is not designed for selfies. It's kind of like buying an expensive car with lots of power, you might not need it all the time, but it's great to have when the need arises.

Sensor sucks? Stupid of me to buy 3 D5's and a D6 ...

And the D4s doesn't wow. The D850 DOES WOW at low ISO!

This is so true. Disappointingly so. I take many photos of the puppies I breed, and I've found some lenses just don't 'do it' for me, so I thought I'd try taking test photos - sort of the photos of brick wall type tests, but I spent much time buying/collecting things that I thought would be good test subjects, including a bunch of brightly colored balls that I glued to a piece of wood, and fur hats, fur tails, and small written text that I glued to wood - and I absolutely could NOT see any real difference between images taken with my uber expensive 180-400 f4 lens with built in TC and my cheapo 50mm 'kit lens.'

Depressing.

But images taken in the 'real world' do seem different to me - at least I notice a difference with images that have shallow depth of field with my 300 2.8 vs. my 'slow' lenses like the 80-400.