Originally posted by BigMackCam If you're shooting JPEG, this is down to the in-camera colour profiling, plus the adjustable settings for contrast and saturation.
If you shoot RAW and post-process in something like Lightroom or Darktable, the colours are down to the camera profile selected (either the camera's embedded profile, or one of those supplied by the software). But, you can tweak the colour, contrast, clarity, tone curve and hue / saturation / luminance of each colour to your taste. It only needs to be done once, then saved as a preset, to give you exactly the colour reproduction you want every time
I'm shooting essentially in JPG (finest / highest quality) because I hate "wasting" (spending) time in PP, unless it's really necessary to dramatically improve the dynamic range on shadows in low light / strong backlighting conditions.
At the beginning I noticed the JPGs to be quite flat, dull, weak, lifeless... right out of the camera and playing intensively with the contrast and brightness wasn't the right result to obtain good JPGs. But after several hundreds os test shots with the K1 I discovered that increasing the clarity to +4 (the writing speed slows down a lot though) the images came to life, the change was night and day, with much more sense of natural (not forced) contrast, colour saturation and "sharpness". The trick for getting quality JPGs is then setting the clarity to +4, nothing else.
However I still find the greens (vegetation) and blues (skies) a bit weak in certain conditions compared to Nikon. If I increase the colour saturation, the result is quite forced for all the other colours and if I play with the hue the whole colour chart "rotates" (changes) in one or other direction and I don't like that, I like the hue (tone) at 0.
I didn't know that I can save different image settings (contrast, clarity, tone curve -hue-, saturation, luminance) for each colour individually to my taste. How can I do that? (I'm going to look that at the owners manual once at home, but in the mean time you might help me on that).
Thanks!