Thom Hogan

Two color-related things came up during my just completed workshop in Botswana and South Africa.

Let’s start with the easy one. If you’re having difficulty with specific colors in the Adobe products, there are two things to do:

1. Get out of Adobe Color. If you want to see something eye-opening, in Lightroom or ACR toggle between a Profile [sic] of Adobe Color and Camera Matching Neutral. You’ll see clear changes in greens and in contrast, probably more. Adobe’s default “color model” of the world is quite different than the real world. It’s unclear to me as to why, but Adobe Color won’t tend to reproduce color or dynamic range the way it actually was captured. For Nikon Z System cameras, I strongly recommend that you reset the default for each of your cameras to (change of wording Adobe, thus my earlier [sic]!) Preset “[camera] Neutral”. This is done in the Defaults section of the ACR preferences, or in Preferences > Presets in Lightroom.
2. Make sure your white balance is correct. You can’t trust As Shot in Adobe products, as they interpret Nikon’s encrypted white balance information differently than does Nikon. If you have a neutral item (white, grey, black) in your scene, try using the eyedropper on that and I’ll bet that the white balance changes. Hmm, neutral wasn’t neutral.

Here’s the thing: when you’re changing colors in an image—whether that be by hue, saturation, or luminosity—if you start with a wrong color you find that your options don’t necessarily work out for what you want to do next. One person was having issues with the greens in Botswana this year. It turned out that this was mostly due to starting with a wrong white balance. This was essentially “clipping” what he could do with some sliders downstream.

Why would that be? Remember that white balance swings the red and blue channels around the green channel to get proper color. If that swing isn’t correct, it may limit what you can do with all colors as you start moving sliders. Moreover, the underlying calculation engine that Adobe uses to make all changes essentially instant is a long way from fully accurate 32-bit floating point math. I’ve found that in extreme situations it is very easy to get to what I’d guess are boundary conditions with sliders (underwater Sony images in ACR are notorious for that). 

But there’s another underlying tenet here. Before you start changing contrast or color, you need to start from a known point, and that would be one that’s neutral to the capture, not one that’s already been modified. 

The second problem is similar, but many aren’t noticing it. Color and contrast shifts happen when you start using a multi-product workflow in conversion. The classic example of this is DxO PureRaw to Lightroom/ACR. One student was finding that color shifted in this process. Well, sure. DxO has a color model they demosaic to, and then they write their results out to a DNG file, which Adobe then uses and applies their own color model to.

One reason why people don’t necessarily notice this is that they’re using PureRaw to defeat noise, and noise generally masks color information (and color noise changes perceived colors). But look at DxO’s own PureRaw marketing: “Get sharper details, richer tones, and beautifully natural results…” You don’t get those last two things without applying contrast and color models. Then you drop the resulting DNG into an Adobe product and…Adobe applies its own contrast and color models. 

This is one reason why I prefer to use DxO PhotoLab for the full raw processing cycle if I want to accept their colors, or PureLab as a Photoshop Smart Filter (and, of course, begin my processing using Camera Matching Neutral). Too many people—and bloggers/vloggers who should know better—are overly micromanaging noise reduction (e.g. “DxO DeepPrime is better than Adobe Denoise is better than Topaz Labs Photo," or any other order they have determined). They’re all pretty darned good, but mixing products that want to apply more than just denoising is not necessarily a good idea.