"Colour" from a camera..

chrism_scotland

chrism_scotland

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Chris
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I know that people tend to bang on about the "Fuji Colours" from the X-Trans sensor in the XT2/X-Pro 2 and others prefer the colour style of other camera makers depending on the type of shots that they take, some tend to be better for skintones, etc, some more suited to landscape.

Is there something to that or in these days of Lightroom and Photoshop is it a bit of a myth that the "colour" produced by the camera matters?

Personally when I look through images on Flickr (Cityscape/Travel/Landscape Stuff) I always seem to find that the ones I find more pleasing are predominantly Canon which I assume must be camera based because I doubt that 100's of people have chosen the exact same processing style before uploading!
 
There is no 'best' IMO - it's all personal preference. I've looked through Flickr random images in the past and paused on ones taken with old bridge cameras. I think it is down to how they are processed a lot more than the gear used. Could just be coincidence that you happen to prefer those images shot using Canons.
 
Since there are many more Canons than other kinds of exchangeable lens cameras, if there was no difference at all in the colour capabilities of different cameras you would expect find far more Canon photographs with good colours, in the same proportion as the excess of Canon cameras. In other words you must divide the number of photos you find for each kind of camera by their proportion in the market. As a first approximation :)
 
Having used many camera brand over the last few years (GAS anyone) I personally think that there is certainly a difference in how brands render colour.

Of course colours etc can be tweaked/completely changed in PS/LR, but for me there are certain brands (Canon/Fuji) that require much less PP tweaks to get them to where I want them to be. I find the Sony (a6000) that I owned however really didn't produce colours that I liked and I had to tweak a lot more to get a pleasing tone.

All of this is of course purely personal and subjective, and I'm sure there are people who prefer Sonys output to Fuji but I know that for me colour SOOC in RAW is certainly a factor in my purchase decisions.
 
It's a difficult question to answer as I don't have or know of any program that shows the RAW image, they're all RAW converters so the colour we see are how adobe etc. have converted them AFAIK. There's certainly a difference in jpegs though, and having shot different brands I would say that there is a difference in the RAW colours as well (especially when I compare my Olympus to my Nikon), although as I've just said this could all be the way adobe etc 'interpret' them.

Sometimes I think I can tell a Canon shot from a Nikon shot but then I look at another image from Flickr thinking it's Nikon and it turns out to be Canon and vice versa.
 
You can usually tell what equipment was used, unless you're into lots of post processing of individual colour channels, colour grading etc then the cameras own colour style will show through. I personally like Canon for Landscape, they have a very noticeable take on reds and greens. Fuji have in the past tended to have very golden colours, though the newer they get the more they have dialled this down and they are now tending very much towards dominant blues, much like Nikon. Sony is all over the place - my A7R was noted for producing eye burning yellow greens and finding purple and magenta and making it stand out when there really should have been none. The best portraiture is undoubtedly Fuji S3/S5.
 
Very much depends on the lenses used too. Lenses have their own unique character and colour rendering. I've used some old adapted lenses on Fuji that had very washed out or muted colours, no pushing of vibrance would make up for it. I had to process files from those lenses in a completely different way to Fuji glass. When I used Nikon I almost always felt vibrance needed a boost in post, no matter the lens, and sometimes with Fuji I reduce it a tad for a more natural look. Too many factors.
 
I used to shoot weddings for a few years on various Nikon bodies so was very used to the files and what was needed in Lightroom to get them looking how I wanted. Last year, I was unable to shoot a wedding I was booked for so managed to get a Canon shooter to shoot and I would edit the files later. It was my first time editing canon files in Lightroom, and it was a revelation - the colours were bang on, very very little adjustment needed. If I had my time again, it would definitely be Canon for me. I since had a couple of the Eos M bodies for pleasure and the colour profile was very similar to the pro bodies that the wedding was shot in.
 
Fuji output definitely has a "look" about it. But if you go back to film, Fuji always had great greens & browns too, I preferred Fuji to Kodak back then. The joy with the Fuji bodies is the film simulation modes, so you can tweak the look, and when you shoot B&W, the raw file comes out in B&W too. My Canons never did that...
 
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