How to sync up colour between lenses?

[ShinySideUp]

That's quite interesting. I always knew that shooting RAW in B&W merely showed that image on the rear display but inside the camera there was a full colour image which was easily recovered in post processing; I didn't know about the white balance thing. I might say though that I would assume setting a particular white balance in camera will set the initial conditions for the shot(s) even though they can subsequently be changed in LR and gives you a known starting point.

 

[wookie6262]

When you set a custom white balance in Sony's you have 3 parameters. Kelvin, blue/yellow and green/magenta in Lightroom you are only dealing with two sliders. Could that make the difference. Tricky in changing light but I tend to shoot with custom white balances and if I am doing colour critical work like school portraits etc a Spyder Checker works very well

 

[Dave Canon]

This is correct in that the WB information is included with the EXIF information with the Raw file but the Raw file is unaltered. You need to know what your software does. If using Canon's DPP it automatically reads the WB and sets that value in the Raw rendering process. For LR, it reads the value and presets that value in the Raw processing but you are free to accept or change which I find to be a good compromise. So for most of my general photography I set Auto WB and rarely need to change the setting in LR. For studio photography I will usually set to the flash temperature in camera but take a shot of the Colour Checker passport every time there is a significant change in the light set up. If necessary, I will measure the WB in LR from the Colour checker shot and set all other shots in that group by synchronising.

On the question of correcting WB in JPEG's this is more difficult. If the WB is wrong in camera (i.e. auto error or set wrong) then correcting in the Raw processor is not straightforward. This is because the original captured image and Raw file are linear but for JPEG Gamma correction is applied. Change the WB in LR to a Gamma corrected image is not the same as a linear Raw file. This never arises for me as I only use Raw.

You cannot readily see a histogram of a Raw file. If you look on the back of the camera it shows the histogram of the embedded JPEG. Looking on LR or ACR it shows a histogram of a simulation of the rendered Raw file (using the settings you have applied) including Gamma correction.

Dave

 

[dancook]

I am sorry for this merry go round...

I figured it out lying in bed last night, and only just remembered... Dxo Pure Raw and Deep Prime processing...

The White Balance is set to the same for all these photos 2750 / +4

The DXO files are a little greener on the 24-70, a little pinker on the 70-200
whereas non DXO look quite a good match.

I've submitted a ticket to DXO

24-70 DXO



24-70


70-200 DXO



70-200

 

[myotis]

I am sorry for this merry go round...

I figured it out lying in bed last night, and only just remembered... Dxo Pure Raw and Deep Prime processing...

The White Balance is set to the same for all these photos 2750 / +4

The DXO files are a little greener on the 24-70, a little pinker on the 70-200
whereas non DXO look quite a good match.

I've submitted a ticket to DXO

24-70 DXO

View attachment 385180

24-70
View attachment 385181

70-200 DXO

View attachment 385182

70-200

View attachment 385183

I'm a bit late to this, and I've only skim read your posts, but if this is a consistent problem with your lenses, I think you may be chasing the wrong thing by looking at white balance because you may well be seeing a "colour cast" caused by the lens. Which although affecting the overall colour, is unrelated to white balance.

The different types of glass used in a lens and the lens coating can result in lenses having different colour casts. In theory the lens coating should correct this colour cast, and different manufacturers may have their own distinctive, and consistent, cast (e.g. in the film days with Kodachrome, Nikon lenses were slightly pink and Canon lenses slightly green).

This was, and still is, a particular problem with large format cameras where you could easily be using lenses made by a range of different manufacturers e.g. Nikon, Fuji, Rodenstock or Schneider (plus others) all on the same job. Although you would normally expect lenses from the same manufacturer to have a matching colour cast, this isn't always the case, and lens vignetting can give a different colour cast across different parts of the image, as can different lens ranges from the same manufacturer, which may have different qualities of coatings.

Currently, my single Zeiss Lens gives a distinctively different (cool) colour cast when compared to my old (warm) Nkkor lenses, and they, in turn, give a different colour cast to my modern (cooler, but not as cool as the Zeiss lens) Nikon lenses. I never use auto white balance, so this is a difference in the lenses. Personally, in my landscape pictures I just ignore these differences as I'm not doing anything that requires precise colour matching. Once upon a time when I was doing scientific/technical photography it mattered, but not now

Capture One has tools to correct lens colour casts, and although not directly relevant it may be useful to see what they have to say. It's primarily aimed at correcting vignetting effects with large format lenses but if you read more about it, people use it for much more than this, including as a general purpose method of correcting lens colour casts.

https://support.captureone.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002583678-The-LCC-tool

I'm no expert with lightroom, but I would have thought the "color calibration sliders" in Lightroom might allow you to make colour profiles for each of your lenses.

It might be worth googling "lens color correction+lightroom +color calibration profile", or something like that, and see if anything useful pops up.

But if you have sorted it out, just ignore me

 

[dancook]

It's definitely DXO, I'll have to wait for them to provide a solution using their software - and meanwhile I can managed the colour cast through WB.

The pain comes is that

70-200 and 24-70 SONY ARW match
but..
24-70 DXO DNG is greener
70-200 DXO DNG is pinker

and that white balance can shift throughout an event.

If I want consistency from images to the next regardless of which lens it was and whether it was processed by DXO or not - i have a headache