Mike wrote in post #9517346
Red colours do often suffer though so you are not alone with this problem. It has to do with the colour gamut and profile that you are shooting with. As the poppies have a very deep red camera sensors often struggle as these tones are outside of the colour space that the camera can handle.
That is partially right (which also means, unfortunately, that it is partially wrong). Actually, the capture space of modern camera sensors is huge, bigger than human vision. The problem comes further down the pipeline when a jpg is created and shoe-horned into a smaller space - either the medium gamut AdobeRGB or the narrower gamut of sRGB. It is then that the extreme reds get crushed and clipped.
And the effect is compounded and made worse by another process that takes place during jpg creation - white balance in applied. WB is done by multiplying all the values of the red and blue channels in order to bring them into balance with the green. And in daylight, because it is bluish and naturally deficient in red, that multiplying is done mostly to the red values which are roughly doubled. That means that that any red value that was naturally greater than half-way up the brightness scale in the original capture gets pushed over the top. In other words, clipped.
What can you do about it? Shoot RAW, which allows you to control the formation of the jpg instead of letting the camera try to handle a special situation (like a red flower) that requires custom-fitted methods with an off-the-peg solution
