Saturation Hell: Is this thing okay?
I've been noticing an annoying thing happening with the D700. Strong colors are being recorded way over-saturated, even in bokeh as you'll see. I went around today to try to get it to happen, and happen it did, way too often. All the files are 14-bit lossless-compressed RAW.
Have a look and please, if anybody has a D700 or D3 let me know if this is a peculiarity of this camera or if you think this thing needs servicing. I have come to understand there is a learning curve with this camera that goes beyond simply how to operate the controls. It doesn't expose the same way as any Canon camera I've owned, so I assume I just have to figure out it's vagaries. I also think that it is possibly overexposing frequently, maybe by a full stop, in other cases. Keep an eye on the histogram—there's often a huge spike.
The problem of the saturation is sometimes helped by a white balance adjustment, but never enough to make it disappear completely. Canons have a well-known problem with rich reds, but a saturation adjustment always smoothly dropped it down with minimal artifacts. Dropping saturation (either overall, or using Lightroom's HSL to individually drop certain channels) keeps the obvious distortion or banding until finally dropping out so much color, the object or color it should be in unrecognizable.
Can anybody tell me what's going on?
Here's just some bokeh I shot to see how it would react:
Another, OOF magenta/red object (a bath toy in this case) that didn't take well to a saturation adjustment. by the time the over-saturation was removed, it became too pale:
And here's yet another, zoomed in on something blue in the BG:
Have a look and please, if anybody has a D700 or D3 let me know if this is a peculiarity of this camera or if you think this thing needs servicing. I have come to understand there is a learning curve with this camera that goes beyond simply how to operate the controls. It doesn't expose the same way as any Canon camera I've owned, so I assume I just have to figure out it's vagaries. I also think that it is possibly overexposing frequently, maybe by a full stop, in other cases. Keep an eye on the histogram—there's often a huge spike.
The problem of the saturation is sometimes helped by a white balance adjustment, but never enough to make it disappear completely. Canons have a well-known problem with rich reds, but a saturation adjustment always smoothly dropped it down with minimal artifacts. Dropping saturation (either overall, or using Lightroom's HSL to individually drop certain channels) keeps the obvious distortion or banding until finally dropping out so much color, the object or color it should be in unrecognizable.
Can anybody tell me what's going on?
Here's just some bokeh I shot to see how it would react:
Another, OOF magenta/red object (a bath toy in this case) that didn't take well to a saturation adjustment. by the time the over-saturation was removed, it became too pale:
And here's yet another, zoomed in on something blue in the BG:
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Comments
Your histograms all appear to be a typical value I get on my D300 or D700 anytime I use Vivid in the shooting menu. I rarely use vivid, for this reason.
I also find the same difficulty in LR2 regarding trying to soften the vivid details in color. I find less of a problem enhancing the colors versus trying to desat them with the Hue/Sat/Lum sliders.
Lastly, My D700 seems to overexpose by about a full stop....which is why I keep a -1.0 dialed in.
Hope this helps~
Moderator of the Cameras and Accessories forums
I shoot RAW and with the Standard Picture Control, so either way, VIVID isn't going to affect me.
It helps to know I'm not crazy or incompetent, but I wish this weren't the case.
The second-to-last last one (bath toy) was shot in incandescent light, but there was a little bit of dusk coming through a skylight, so the correct WB was about 3500K. All the others were shot in sunlight or in shade, with no artificial lights on. The worst thing is that I have more examples—many more—where a relatively vivid object just kills the overall, or where something with a lower-middle to shadow tone bands and like crazy.
I saw that the WB was 4000 degrees or less. I noticed too that in one image you had to pull back the exposure in LR by -1, which could indicate an overexposure.
Reds tend to be tricky in warn white balance because the imager is balanced for daylight. In warm WB the reds are already more dominant and if you try to achieve anything above middle tones (according to the exposure metering of the camera) they blow out rather easily. This is also indicative of Bayer chips and you don't see this as much with the Foveon imagers (which have their own set of problems.)
Since only 25 percent of the image information is red, in a Bayer chip, when the red channel gets saturated the pure red subjects can lose all detail and become clipped.
The moral, shooting red subjects in warm white balance "requires" underexposure of the image in order to avoid supersaturation of the red channel, with the undesirable effects. The same is true of blue objects in a very "cool" white balance.
Unfortunately underexposing the image to save red detail may "grossly" underexpose the blue channel, and result in plugged shadows. For critical work you may have to blend 2 exposures to avoid the problems you will almost certainly encounter with a single exposure in these conditions.
Moderator of the Cameras and Accessories forums
Some of the indoors shots, with natural light looked best with lower-than-anticipated WB settings, as you saw. The -1 you mentioned was part of the +1 stop overexposure I'm experiencing, and angevin1 corroborated. This was just to get my son's skin tones to look like he wasn't reflecting a supernova.
If this is part of learning my craft—fine—I'm up for the challenge, but the green object blew out at 5500K (outdoors), which doesn't make any sense to me. There is more that seems unusual, which I may post here, but I don't see other people complaining of this sort of thing, outside of our own dear angevin1. The point about blocked shadows as a result of compensating for a red/warm or blue/cool object makes sense; I just don't recall seeing this level of susceptibility with any other camera.
I suppose it goes without saying that a calibrated monitor is essential—and all my monitors are calibrated frequently. Perhaps aging is the biggest enemy here. Gonna look at these in LR on the Apple and Dell 24" displays and probably learn something about this exercise.
I noticed there is a CF that lets you trim the sensitivity of the exposure for each metering mode. What would be the best method to calibrate a sensor for exposure? Perhaps an evenly lit gray card shot and somehow determining in photoshop how far the exposure is from 18% gray?
I prefer to solve this problem the old fashioned way with an 80A filter. Software correction of exteme WB always looks off even if you shoot RAW.
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I haven't tried any kind of analogue solution yet. Thanks for the tip.
Yeah, I think most of the supersaturation problem is my laptop, as both my desktop monitors are much better and I would have the same assessment as you. Might be time to replace laptop or add an external monitor.
This saturation issue is just one in a series of little niggles with the switch to Nikon, all tied into "switcher's remorse"
I mentioned in another thread that I cannot get my green wall fabric to show up on the sensor as having any color, no matter what I do to the exposure or the WB. It makes me wonder what else it's not recording . It's little things like this that made me think there's something out of whack inside this camera—or possibly in my own head. The light is side-lit daylight coming through a wide window. The orange electrical sockets are accurate. Here's a picture of the wall:
The wall fabric is supposed to look something like in between one of these:
I look at other people's D700/D3 photos and I don't see anything wrong with them—I just want to get to the bottom of what I'm seeing. Again, thanks for the help.
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It's an image from the camera, processed minimally from the RAW and uploaded as an sRGB JPEG. on my better monitors, it's also lacking color.
1/5s, f/8 ISO 200, manual WB (would have to open LR to find out).