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A7R color space compared to...

Ben Rubinstein

Active member
I don't know about the technicalities but I did some in depth comparisons of the 5DIII, D800 and A7r for skin tones and the Sony won by a mile. Then canon (which surprised me) then Nikon. All using ACR as a raw converter. Haven't tried in C1 but their sony profile is horrible for skin and I never liked what they did with canon files in the reds either.
 

philip_pj

New member
It gells with my experience of Sony - they (and Minolta) always had a good grasp of colour and paid a big price in the high ISO obsessed market back in a900 days; there was a good step up with the release of the a99 and RX1 and again a step forward with the a7r, for colour representation. Sony mentioned it but few were listening.

You see very little chat about colour, many shooters don't rate colour highly, or perhaps don't see it very well, compared to say, the noise fetish that underlies ETTR. You need to 'care' for colour, as intimated in the video, keep it in a large space to prevent clipping and compression, and don't push it around too much! Once it's gone, it ain't coming back.

Being purely a colour photographer, I would not use a non-Sony FF camera. Allied to the greater tonality at base ISO due to the super dynamic range, they are now very good. A lot of the more perceptive ex-D800 and ex-5D landscape shooters are finding that out right now as they migrate across to the better, well-balanced colour of the Sony FE platform. Clients notice too..

Agree re space volume, and see how the very broad a7r gamut wall stays fairly equidistant from the Prophoto space gamut wall as the framework turned around?
I would never save worked keeper PS files in a small space any more than one would save a flattened (non-layered) master file - sRGB / aRGB files are immediately apparent as different from larger space files. It's a shame to have to crunch them down for output.

Gamuts for printers will improve over time as will displays, and that fine-graded colour at the extremes of the tone range really enhances an image, makes it less coarse, less compressed, more natural. Thanks!
 

philip_pj

New member
Back to add that a lot of people expect improvement in sensors that are tangible and measurable, such as a clear difference in the field or DxO results. Some people were disappointed the a7r felt just like the D800e and that is how DxO saw them:

Sony A7R versus Nikon D800E - Side by side camera comparison - DxOMark

But this color gamut expansion is really significant, and very few photographers will ever know about it - the a7r can actually capture colors that its competitors cannot. Another sign too that Sony think the sensor is pretty good as it is.
 

Georg Baumann

Subscriber Member
...see how the very broad a7r gamut wall stays fairly equidistant from the Prophoto space gamut wall as the framework turned around?
Precisely!

I am not sure what software he used for the plots, chromix or something I guess. Would be very interesting to see a plot of some recent MFDB with that 50MP Sony CMOS against the A7R.
 

Georg Baumann

Subscriber Member
Sony wins . I'm not surprised for a second and I always use ProPhoto color space
Hey Guy, as you are somewhat new to LR, just for info, LR always uses ProPhotoRGB internally, you have to watch it however, should you export images to NIK collection for example, make sure it stays in that color space, and check that from the export preferences. I remember that Viveza for example used to have AdobeRGB set for standard.
 
Hey Guy, as you are somewhat new to LR, just for info, LR always uses ProPhotoRGB internally
it uses ProPhotoRGB coordinates w/ linear gamma... but you remember that you can use a camera jpg imitating dcp profile (aka DNG profile) - those "vivid", "natural", "faithful", etc profiles supplied by Adobe for some cameras and even if your internal working colorspace is huge the initial color transform guided by the said dcp profile will clamp everything within sRGB coordinates (now certainly you can then do some processing and get beyond that as a result of your operations)
 

Annna T

Active member
it uses ProPhotoRGB coordinates w/ linear gamma... but you remember that you can use a camera jpg imitating dcp profile (aka DNG profile) - those "vivid", "natural", "faithful", etc profiles supplied by Adobe for some cameras and even if your internal working colorspace is huge the initial color transform guided by the said dcp profile will clamp everything within sRGB coordinates (now certainly you can then do some processing and get beyond that as a result of your operations)
Are you sure about sRGB ? I thought that you could output to aRGB too when printing from LR. Why would it go from ProPhoto, to sRGB then to aRGB ? On all my cameras, I can choose either sRGB OR A RGB
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Just because a linear gamut color space from a camera is large/larger/largest, does not mean it is at the same time accurate/best. In fact, I can define my debayer code to create a huge colorspace -- and I can virtually guarantee you nobody would like the look from it without a bunch of tweaking ;) Moreover, assuming I make a correct debayer conversion, the visible differences will be irrelevant at 10-bit depth, better at 12, and finally approaching reality at 14-16... But now I can also guarantee that you won't like reality color very much either, and will need to tweak it to taste! :)
 
Why would it go from ProPhoto, to sRGB
it does not go from ProPhoto color space, to sRGB color space... the color transform guided by such dcp profiles (w/o you doing some changes in UI like boosting saturation) will most probably result in your colors fitting within narrow coordinates (say matching sRGB or aRGB coordinates) but in the same ACR/LR working color space...
 

Malina DZ

Member
I am sorry - but he is talking about C1 ICC profiles, not about camera "color spaces" (quotes intended)
Good remark! I wish camera manufactures included a color space graph for the sensor used referenced to ProPhotoRGB in the spec sheet.

Since we are in the Sony thread, no one here yet raised a concern about Sony's ARW lossy file compression (8 bits per pixel in output file). Maybe because most photographers edit images on 8-bit monitors and the difference is not clear enough compared to 12/14-bit files.
Maybe, in 10 years, once monitors supporting 100% accurate ProPhotoRGB color space become a commodity, those who switched to Sony cameras outputting 8-bit RAW files will realize a mistake. Especially those who have a habit of retouching archived raw images.
 
Good remark! I wish camera manufactures included a color space
it is not a proper color space (not even a set of {"r", "g", "b"}, again quotes intended here, coordinates /coordinates where ? that's the issue/ after demosaicking) until there is a color transform from that into a proper colorimetric color space - there were a number of lengthy discussions with many esteemed participants (for example @ LuLa forums or apple colorsync mailing list) -google it
 

Malina DZ

Member
deejjjaaaa, found & read it. Thank you for a hint.
Well, all I can add to this topic is I'd rather spend time on improving my composition skills :)
 
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