Taming the rendered color RED - Canon 5D, 30D

My advice would to be totally ignore ANY of the camera settings and to stop shooting jpgs. If you shoot RAW and convert through Photoshop CS2 you can calibrate the red hue and red saturation individually to your tastes in ACR 3.3 (which supports the 5D).

One of the joys of the "pro-grade cameras" is the ability to shoot RAW and the flexibility and control that gives you after the fact. Once you get a streamlined workflow established and have read and digested Bruce Fraser's excellent book "Real World Camera Raw with Photoshop CS2" I can guarantee that you won't let your camera make color, WB, saturation, contrast, sharpness, etc. decisions for you, and probably won't ever shoot another jpg!

I agree with the suggestion to just shoot RAW.

If you use a RAW converter like CS2 ACR you will often see that strong red or blue subject areas are actually clipping the red or blue respectively channel in your target colour space. You can then adjust exposure and or saturation to deal with this.

Alternatively if you must shoot JPEG try underexposing by 1/2 stop where you have strong colours.

Do you absolutely need the perfect color reproduction directly out of the camera? You should beable to easily correct for the colors in photoshop. For that red capped crane for example, you can adjust saturation. select the red channel, click the red cap, then change the saturation and change the hue to offer a more realistic image.

I've had great luck with shooting RAW with my 5D and using the Fors/RagsInc calibration technique with a gretagmacbeth ColorChecker. I, and most others, come out with a calibration set that counter-intuitively boosts the red saturation quite a bit. However there's also a significant shift in the red channel hue. My theory is that the sensor and/or stock ACR calibration is deficient in orange or purple, and the hue shift and saturation boost fills in the hole and gives you reds that look much more natural and rich and don't require as much global saturation. Who knows, it definitely seems to work. To my eyes the results are richer and less pastel than stock, and with an additional global saturation boost are almost velvia-like with a lot of pop and contrast.

You can search here, fredmiranda.com, dpreview.com etc for people's posted calibration numbers to give it a whirl. Most of them seem to be similar in broad strokes for a given model. I can post mine late tonight if you like.

FYI, with my D70 I had a similar situation - colors were interesting but just didn't have any life. I sold the camera before discovering the calibration routine, but found some other people's calibrations and tried them to great effect. With that camera, it's highly deficient in green saturation.

If you're a stickler for detail, you'll want seperate calibrations for daylight and tungsten. Other types of light seem to fall pretty close to one or the other. I made my 5D daylight calibration part of the default settings, that's how much I liked it. Haven't seen the red problem since.

Human sensitivity to color and perception thereof varies considerably, so realistic color is a moving target. You can never make everyone happy. With that said, I agree, it's time to go RAW and convert according to taste with tweaks in PS. Staright JPEGS ain't never gonna please beyond point 'n shoot. With the PS color selecton menu you can muffle and stroke red to a dull rust if needed.

I've never cared for neutral or realistic colors and always choose films like Velvia, Kodachrome or Portra 160VC for the vivid albeit unrealistic hues. With the 5D RAW I'm in fake color heaven as I can stroke 'n poke 'em 'till the cows come home. If Canon DSLRs only yielded perfectly neutral and realistic colors, few would buy one.

Shoot RAW. In DPP, Faithful Picture Style is a good start for reds. In ACR, hold the ALT key while sliding the exposure slider until you see that you aren't clipping any reds. If the reduced exposure is too dark, increase the brightness slider. Re-check the red clipping.

easy fix with any software for post proccesing, Bibble, Capture One, ACR, etc, etc

Although this has been repeated above, it is so important it's worth repeating again: SHOOT RAW.

Before I bought a digital camera I had read so many threads by folks claiming digital has such a limited dynamic range, has such red difficulty, digital artifacts, and various other complaints over and over. Despite the controversy I bought digital (1Ds2) because business realities forced me to. I started out shooting raw, and I started wondering 'what about all of the digital problems, I'm not seeing any...'

Then one day I was running out of card room on a shoot that was not going to be enlarged very far. So I shot in largest j-peg, thinking I'd notice little difference. WRONG! So there were the problems! Highlight blowouts, blocked up shadows, color problems. Now, when I read harsh criticism of digital I check further to see of the person was shooting j-pegs. So often that seems to be the case.

Folks, shoot raw files. Cards are getting cheaper and cheaper. Buy bigger or more cards, or both. The difference is major.

I think Lester has identified the problem here, and it is one that I encounter quite commonly in botanical work with intensely red, or less commonly blue, flowers. You CANNOT fix this problem in post-processing, since by then it is too late, and you probably cannot fix it at all if you work with 8-bit images, so RAW is the way to go. Remember that the usual advice about "expose to the right but don't blow out the highlights" applies to each colour channel. It is remarkable how quickly the red channel saturates when confronted with some natural reds, and you need to set the exposure to a level that by most criteria would be regarded as significant under-exposure to avoid this. Then you can indeed adjust the image in post processing. But remember too, that your monitor and printer may also have a problem with some of these colours. The Canon i9950, with its red (actually, a sort of orange-scarlet) ink is capable of doing quite a good job.

Another vote for shooting RAW and ACR calibration using Rags scripts. The hardest part is getting a properly exposed image of the color checker.

John

I truly appreciate everyone's effort and input. RAW is a noteworthy choice. Downside: it places a heavy load on camera, computer and in particular post-production time required. Truth is, I do shoot RAW extensively and have five different raw-file converters on my system. I'm also a successful practicing pro with decades of experience. But there is the other 60% of the time when jpegs are highly suitable and practical without involving excessive post-production time. And jpeg image quality can be superb. RAW is not a magic bullet. My quest for "taming the reds" is that of a reasonable camera Photo-Style adjustment and tweaking on the 5D that brings red to reasonable levels when shooting jpegs. My thought was basic: why try to reinvent the wheel if someone else has the jpeg answer?

Though a keen amateur for over 20 years, I only recently bought an EOS 5D (in January of this year). A couple of months later (unware of what the RAW format was)I shot a wedding using fine JPEG and the 'Portrait' setting (it was a bright day with strong, direct sunlight to make things worse!). Comparing the wedding pictures with others I have taken since using RAW and trying different shooting modes, eg. Landscape, Neutral, etc... I noticed the following: The wedding shots were VERY contrasty.. which exacerbated already tricky shooting conditions and.. all pictures appeared to have more red than expected. The excess of red was particularly noticeable in darker areas of the picture or if I underexposed even slightly...disproportionately so. Skin tones were badly affected by this excess of red.

As a result of my own experimentation, I've found that the settings that yield the most faithful results (especially in terms of colour balance, saturation and contrast) are: Use RAW format Adove RGB colour space 'Faithful' mode (excellent for taming high contrast)

Of course in RAW, many decisions can be made during the editing process, but JPEGs seem to benefit from these 'in-camera- settings.

I'm still very much on the learning curve so your comments/suggestions are most valued.

The lens and CCD contribute to the color. I find the 17-40 gives more natural colors vs the 24-105 which screams red.

I have had this same problem with my equipment too (Canon 30D,Tamron 28-75 2.8,Canon 70-200 2.8, & Tamron 18-200 lenses). I have done the same things as you have with great frustration! I don't like to use RAW unless it's a very important shoot and I'm not taking many images. I just want to take simple images out of this pro grade equipment and be satisfied without all the extra work! My solution to this very big problem was to just put down this camera for this kind of work and pick up my $300.00 Kodak Z712 with it's awsome "color science chip". This little camera does an excellent job and will be hard for most pros to except, but sometimes simplicity is the best answer. When people see you with a camera this small they won't take you as serious as they would with large expecieve equipment but the images speek for themselves. The Fuji S3 & S5 pro cameras are the next best thing. They have that double pixle CCD sensor tecnology that's very accurate!