The colour Red

To my eyes, my 7d produces a red which is far too bright. I've seen a few comment like this when I google it, but no solution. My fix is to reduce saturation on red by -10 as part of my standard import prefix in LR. My question is: do people agree and if so, what is their fix?

Every manufacturer seems to want to have their own unique look when they create their profiles. I prefer to shoot RAW and edit using Adobe Standard which, (for my camera) is essentially equivalent to a dual illuminant profile that I could make myself with a ColorChecker target.

Using Adobe Standard I also see less of a difference in the color "look" between my Canon and Nikon equipment, particularly for outdoor shots.

Kirth Gersen wrote in post #16652820
To my eyes, my 7d produces a red which is far too bright. I've seen a few comment like this when I google it, but no solution. My fix is to reduce saturation on red by -10 as part of my standard import prefix in LR. My question is: do people agree and if so, what is their fix?

If you are using LR, I assume you are shooting Raw and if you are shooting Raw it is not your 7D that is producing the red, but rather 100% LR. If you are shooting jpgs, then yes, it is the camera that is rendering the red.

You can see anything if you google long enough.

The fix is to continue what you are already doing; adjust LR to fit your taste, then make a preset or new defaults.

tzalman wrote in post #16652965
If you are using LR, I assume you are shooting Raw and if you are shooting Raw it is not your 7D that is producing the red, but rather 100% LR. If you are shooting jpgs, then yes, it is the camera that is rendering the red.

You can see anything if you google long enough.

The fix is to continue what you are already doing; adjust LR to fit your taste, then make a preset or new defaults.

I don't think I understand you. Are you saying that LR changes the RAW file when it displays it?

I shoot RAW. And here is an extreme example of what I see going into LR as a RAW file unedited in any way and saved as jpg (it looks the same as the RAW file to me).

IMAGE IS A REDIRECT OR MISSING! Content warning: data

RAW is unprocessed information. When you load it into lightroom, LR gives you its default preview of the data (much like reviewing on your camera is Canon's default preview of the data).

Also you may be influenced because the human eye picks out the color red faster than other colors and thus it tends to stand out more.

Yes, that is absolutely what I'm saying. That's what Raw converters do; LR, ACR, C1, DPP, the converter inside your camera, all of them. They don't change the Raw file itself, but they read the Raw data from the file and then change it fundamentally. The Raw data is the essential first ingredient in a complex process that produces a color image, but the Raw itself contains no color data except by inference, it is a record of the intensity of the light that struck each pixel - greyscale data, one value per pixel, but not the color of that light. Since the pixels sit behind red, green or blue filters the single value represents the intensity of red or green or blue light, but the pixel itself contains no indication of which one of the primary colors it represents, the converter infers it from the position of the pixel in the grid. But that accounts for only 3 colors out of the possible 4.4 trillion that can be represented by combining the R, G and B and having three values in each pixel. The converter creates those 4.4 trillion colors by a process called demosaicing in which for each pixel the other two "missing" values are interpolated from neighboring pixels. Thus the colors created are very much dependent on the demosaicing algorithms used and as well as the colors they also influence local contrast, sharpness and detail rendering and noise.

After the converter has a color image the next step is to adjust those colors according to how the camera reacts to various subject colors and various light conditions as is recorded in the camera profile. The converter designers also create several variations on the basic profile in order to give the user a choice of color renderings - Picture Styles in the camera and DPP or DNG Camera Profiles in LR and ACR.

The next step is white balancing, in which the red and blue values are all multiplied by the amount necessary to make grey subjects be rendered as grey images. The greens are generally left unchanged or only slightly changed unless there has to be compensation for light that has a strong green element, some fluorescents or light reflected from foliage.

All this is done in the first few seconds after you open a Raw in the converter (and much faster in the camera) and then you, the user, get the opportunity to change the colors and tonal levels the converter has created. If you don't care for the reds the converter has created as it built on and expanded the Raw data, you are free to do so - unless the converter is the one used by the camera as it produces a jpg, in which case your ability to change the colors is not as flexible.

Canon cameras do tend to have a more brightly-exposed red channel compared to other manufacturers, regardless of raw processing.

This is a common complaint with portrait photographers, since it means in extra step in post of having to desaturate/hue the red channel a pinch to make faces less red. Canon has yet to "fix" this after a decade of making digital cameras, which probably leads me to believe they're doing it intentionally.

When making the dyes used for the bayer filter on the sensor, manufacturers can carefully choose the precise spectrum of colors that the filter either "blends" or "separates", and surprisingly, in a lot of cases good color separation is actually detrimental to the average photographer. For example, medium format digital cameras have very acute color separation, which allows for high color fidelity, but they only tend to look good under the right kind of light, photograph a person with an MF camera under mixed fluorescent light and they'll look like a corpse. On the other side of the coin, Canon cameras are designed for fluorescent (read: stadium) lighting, which spikes in the blue spectrum, and thus fudge green/blue while enhancing the red channel, since subjects under such light lack red.

Thanks chaps,

Very thorough explanations. Wouldn't mind hearing what people do to combat it in LR either as a preset, or if they change it on the fly very time, or if they don't worry about it.

In the Develop Module click on Camera Calibration, click on profile and select the one that best reflects your expectations. Choose from Camera Faithful, Camera Landscape, Camera Neutral, Camera Portrait or Camera Standard.

If you find one that is satisfactory set your camera to use that Picture Style, then all your future shots will open with that default profile.

Nope, that won't do it; LR doesn't see the camera's Picture Style. You will have to either change LR's defaults by holding down the alt/opt key and when the Reset button changes to Reset Defaults clicking on it or make yourself an import preset.

You can also reduce Red Primary saturation in the Calibration panel. In the early days of ACR/LR when the reds were really over the moon, that's what we used to do.