[house]

I can't imagine even caring about accurate colour except in maybe catalogue work where people may be choosing things to go with other things they already own. Hold the jacket up beside the image....is it the same colour? Photograph a colour chart in the corner of your images. Hold the image up beside the colour chart, adjust to get it as close as possible.

I quite like the Pentax colours (Natural setting) but sometimes you shoot something and feel the colours are just way off. Lots of timber buildings in sweden are painted with a particular red paint. You can see straight away the reds of such buildings are off, it being such a common paint people are quite sensitive to 'error'.

[BigMackCam]

I quite like the Pentax colours (Natural setting) but sometimes you shoot something and feel the colours are just way off. Lots of timber buildings in sweden are painted with a particular red paint. You can see straight away the reds of such buildings are off, it being such a common paint people are quite sensitive to 'error'.

Reds are my "bug bear" with Pentax JPEGs, at least on the K-3 and K-3II. There's a definite bias towards magenta in them For all that, they can look very nice in the right circumstances, but they're far from accurate

[microlight]

I rarely worry about colour accuracy except when I’m copying my wife’s paintings using pixel shift. Otherwise I work from the RAWs and get to what’s most pleasing - most often that includes toning down the reds, Mike!

[biz-engineer]

Photograph a colour chart in the corner of your images. Hold the image up beside the colour chart, adjust to get it as close as possible.

I've had that idea too. After working at it for a while, I found the manual tweak of colors very cumbersome due to the fact that tuning one color affects all other colors in a photograph. My conclusion, it is a multi-dimensional color calibration best done automated and rawtherapee doesn't offer an automated color calibration feature based on a reference color char.

[ThorSanchez]

Reds are my "bug bear" with Pentax JPEGs, at least on the K-3 and K-3II. There's a definite bias towards magenta in them For all that, they can look very nice in the right circumstances, but they're far from accurate

In Squirrel Mafia's RawTherapee thread I posted a shot a few months ago where my reds seemed over-saturated. To the point where I used some advice and came up with a partial PP3 file just to bump red saturation down a couple notches. Now that you bring this up, maybe that's the effect I'm seeing - RT trying to Auto-match the K-3ii's JPG rendering and that not being quite right.

---------- Post added 02-01-19 at 07:59 AM ----------

It's definitely important for product photography - catalogues, advertising, online product configuration choices, fine art reproduction etc...

Imagine selecting the colour for your new car then finding it's a completely different shade upon delivery?

In 2004 I ordered a new Mini Cooper S from the dealer, with all the options exactly as I wanted. But in the transition from the '04 model year to '05 they discontinued something like "Indie Blue" which was a dark blue, and replaced it with "Hyper Blue" which was a few shades lighter. There were no Hyper Blue cars to look at, as mine was one of the first '05s to ship. So all I had was photographs.

In the end it was all good, I liked the color. But car colors can pretty dramatically change based on the lighting where ever it is parked, so the photographs were only of so much help even if they were perfectly matched. And I have to idea if they were.

[Digitalis]

Imagine selecting the colour for your new car then finding it's a completely different shade upon delivery?

Funny you mention that: years ago when film was the only medium in commercial photography, my colleague* and I wrapped up on a studio shoot of a classic hotrod for an automotive publication and sent the film off to be developed. A few days later we get the transparencies back, and my colleague rushes into into my workspace with a panicked look upon his face "the colours are all wrong, the car is supposed to be dark purple, not pink" I looked at the transparencies - I'll admit, It took me a while to figure out the problem as I had never seen anything like it before.

It turns out, the strobes we were working with threw out a lot of UV and it seemed the multi-layered paint on the car reflected it in a rather unique way. With the deadline rapidly approaching we were able to book another shoot with the cars owner (and gate crashed another photographers studio time) with only 2 days left, we got the shoot done. This time, I used my connections in the scientific field and managed to borrow three plate glass Dichroic wide-band UV cut filters that were only just big enough to fit on the strobes filter holders....complete overkill but I wasn't going to take any chances**.


When the follow up shoot transparencies came in the colours were perfect.


* Who was the more experienced and seasoned photographer than I was. I have worked with him many times since this incident, and we have a running joke "wait, that's not purple" when something goes awry.
** Yes, it would have been cheaper to use UV cut filters on the lenses, however in the studio, flare and ghosting can rear its head in unexpected ways especially with shiny chrome car parts...it wasn't worth the risk.

[northcoastgreg]

try to reduce the brightness of the shadows and than increase the contrast.

Increasing the contrast of the whole image does work, but it also pull down the shadows in opposite direction to what we want to do when having to raise shadows of a landscape shot for example. Decreasing global contrast brings up the shadow but also reduced the contrast in well exposed area.

Precisely for this reason, I avoid using global contrast altogether. I will start by raising shadows, and if the contrast in the shadowed areas holds up, I'll leave it at that. If the contrast in the shadowed areas get hosed, I'll draw back and grab the brush in Lightroom. With the brush I'll add exposure and contrast and sometimes even clarity to the shadowed area. If noise becomes a problem, I'll adjust for that --- selectivity, with the brush. If the colors get wonky, again, I'll adjust with the brush using the white balance sliders. I've found that leveraging the power of the brush in Lightroom works pretty for well for dealing with these issues.