EOS 5D + studio lighting - strong red bias on skin tones

After many years of owning various Canon prosumer digital SLR (D30, D60, 10D and 20D), I have recently upgraded to Canon EOS 5D. The new camera works perfectly, however my tests under studio lighting conditions indicate a very strong red bias on skin tones

I want to understand if this is a problem with a camera or if I am doing something wrong. I will provide full details below, but in a nutshell the camera exhibits a strong red bias on human skin under studio lighting conditions despite all attempts to achieve proper white balance

Conditions:
1) Camera body - Canon EOS 5D
2) Lenses - Canon 28-135 mm f3.5-5.6 or Canon 100 mm f2.8
3) Studio lighting setup - two Elinchrom Style FX400 compacts (rated at 5650 K) supplemented by a few Portaflash fill-ins. Softboxes on all main flashes.
4) Light balance - custom (using Jessops gray card) or explicit Color Temperature Compensation (set to 5700 K)
5) Control gray card shots indicate no problems with white balance
6) Color space - Adobe RGB 1998
7) Studio background - black velvet or white paper; studio walls are painted neutral pale yellow, no reflective or strong-colored surfaces within flash range
8 ) Ambient light - non-existent for all practical means and purposes (about 16 f-stops under main flash)
9) Model - caucasian female, blond, fair skinned, minimum make-up
10) Picture Style – 0 0 0 0
11) Aperture - around f/8

Problem manifestation:
1) The camera shows a significant red tint on all photographs which is particularly pronounced on the subject's skin
2) This tint is much stronger then I ever experienced with any other EOS camera body. It is also the “wrong color” from what I experienced before with EOSes - my previous bodies tended to have a slight yellow or blue tint, never red.
3) The RGB histogram indicates a strong red bias.
4) This bias could be compensated with a custom “Picture style”, but it requires a “Skin Tone” of 2 or 3 (out of -4 to +4 range). This appears to be excessive.
5) EOS 10D body demonstrates no such problem

I know that red-skin is a common problem for portraiture, but I have never experienced it so strongly under what is supposed to be highly controlled conditions.

Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated.

hum my 5D does great in studio. Are you shooting in RAW or JPEG? If your shooting in JPEG set the Picture styles to Faithful. if your shooting in RAW and not editing in Canons software it doesnt matter which Picture style you shoot in....

Never had a problem with that. I shoot raw, leave it on "normal" picture style and process in DPP.

Is your color shift all normal, and your factory settings on the default? I can't imagine that being a sensor problem, just the internals.

You didn't mention which Picture Style you're using. Canon's "Portrait" picture style is rather notorious for producing pink-to-red skin tones; it's not clear if that's supposed to add color to pale skin, or maybe if it looks good with Asian skin. But whatever the reasoning, the result is still over-pink for most subjects at the default settings. The usual recommendation is to turn the saturation down one or two notches, and turn the color tone up one or two notches. Or just use another picture style, such as Faithful.

There was quite a long detailed discussion of this problem on the Rob Galbraith forum last year. It was the consensus that it is due to the DIGIC II processor in the newer cameras. The best solution posted, which I use now, was to correct it in Photoshop. Make a Channel Mixer adjustment layer. Select the Green output channel and set it for Green-80% and Red-20%. Now select the Blue output channel and set it for Blue-90% and Red-10%. You can tweak the values to get the exact color you want.

It is a bit of bother to have to do this, but you can create an action if you have many images to correct. Here is a sample of the effect.

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chtgrubbs wrote in post #2837466
There was quite a long detailed discussion of this problem on the Rob Galbraith forum last year. It was the consensus that it is due to the DIGIC II processor in the newer cameras. The best solution posted, which I use now, was to correct it in Photoshop. Make a Channel Mixer adjustment layer. Select the Green output channel and set it for Green-80% and Red-20%. Now select the Blue output channel and set it for Blue-90% and Red-10%. You can tweak the values to get the exact color you want.

It is a bit of bother to have to do this, but you can create an action if you have many images to correct. Here is a sample of the effect.

Thanks! I've been working on my own little tweaks for this, but will try this one. Glad this is not another case of me "seeing things".

chtgrubbs wrote in post #2837466
There was quite a long detailed discussion of this problem on the Rob Galbraith forum last year. It was the consensus that it is due to the DIGIC II processor in the newer cameras. The best solution posted, which I use now, was to correct it in Photoshop. Make a Channel Mixer adjustment layer. Select the Green output channel and set it for Green-80% and Red-20%. Now select the Blue output channel and set it for Blue-90% and Red-10%. You can tweak the values to get the exact color you want.

It is a bit of bother to have to do this, but you can create an action if you have many images to correct. Here is a sample of the effect.

I'm glad it's not me either. I've noticed a reddish/magenta hue to skin tones that has been making colour balancing absolute hell. I'm going to give this a try and I'm pretty optimistic considering the two examples look pretty much just like how my shots look before correcting, and how I'd like them to look post correcting.

Thank you

I tried this and ended up toning the corrections down a bit, the results were a tad too yellow; but it's a great way to deal with this!

I had that problem also until I set Picture style to "neutral" in DPP when processing RAW to TIF.

Not owning a 5D, but knowing bits and pieces of color management theory my answer would be that the camera can't capture wrong color. There's an error in a processing step somewhere (look like the DigicII processor)

So you'll have to manually override the in-camera processing. You should be able to cure it by chooting raw and calibrating to a color checker like this.

Hopefully if you're using third party RAW converter it would not be affected by the in-camera processing.

Mine does great in the studio, oh wait, I set the custom white balance first.

DocFrankenstein wrote in post #2839509
Hopefully if you're using third party RAW converter it would not be affected by the in-camera processing.

With ACR it still comes up.

Through my experience, there is no color temperature that corrects this issue. I've used a white card/color checker (wahtever you want to call it) to set my white point off of, and there is still too much magenta in the skin tones. It isn't that all the colours are shifted in any one direction (something that can be fixed with colour balance) but rather the pinks are more saturated than the rest of the colours.

elTwitcho wrote in post #2842508
With ACR it still comes up.

Through my experience, there is no color temperature that corrects this issue. I've used a white card/color checker (wahtever you want to call it) to set my white point off of, and there is still too much magenta in the skin tones. It isn't that all the colours are shifted in any one direction (something that can be fixed with colour balance) but rather the pinks are more saturated than the rest of the colours.

Beats me then.

It'd be interesting to know what they suggested on rob gailbrath's forums as the solution.

I applied this

chtgrubbs wrote in post #2837466
There was quite a long detailed discussion of this problem on the Rob Galbraith forum last year. It was the consensus that it is due to the DIGIC II processor in the newer cameras. The best solution posted, which I use now, was to correct it in Photoshop. Make a Channel Mixer adjustment layer. Select the Green output channel and set it for Green-80% and Red-20%. Now select the Blue output channel and set it for Blue-90% and Red-10%. You can tweak the values to get the exact color you want.

to about 200 shots and it works great!!!! Just make an action and link it to a key, then it takes .2 seconds to apply

Thank you, chtgrubbs!

You are very welcome.