Dear friends,
In 2017 I bought a Pentax K3II, but I have never really become friends with it. It never gave pictures with the same colour saturation and contrast as my old K20D. Some pictures were OK, but many, many outright horrible. I mainly only shoot on when travelling etc; you might call it landscapes with some good will. Only JPEG straight out of the camera.
I have asked for advice a couple of times on this Forum, and I have got many valuable (if occasionally contradictory) tips and comments over the years. Several contributors (like Peppery farm, Stevebrot, Pschlute, Mikesbike) seem to be a bit cross that I did not come back to thank for the tips, and announce that everything was OK now.
The reason is that it has taken me five years to digest the tips and find all the settings you have mentioned, and change them. I have also got rid of all my old lenses. I now only have DA40, DA50 and DFA100WR and an old 70-210.
The most annoying thing was that image tone setting changed accidentally all the time, away from the “landscape” setting I prefer. I tried to set the four-way controller to control the AF point instead. It rarely worked. I suppose I will have to resort to U1 etc.
Speaking of image tone, some comments say that “bright” and “natural” give good colour saturation and contrast. In my experience accidental settings at “bright” have given some of the worst results. “Bleach bypass” is sometimes interesting, but far too murky to be usable. Can it be tweaked a bit? What is “Bleach bypass” and what is it meant for? Brilliant and vibrant are no options. BTW, do the various image tone settings affect sharpness somehow?
The other recurring problem is that ISO settings have flown away accidentally and become far too high. U1 again. It seems one shouldn’t go beyond 400 for landscapes. But I obviously need DOF and small apertures. So it seems that I can hardly use the camera in low light, at least not for landscapes. This is bad news, because we have a lot of low light in Sweden.
Just two crops to illustrate remaining differences. Never mind the sharpness. It’s the colours I’m worried about. Mostly the same (recommended) settings. The only differences are D-range settings, and high ISO noise reduction, saturation and contrast, 1 and 1 on K3II; 0 and 2 on K20D. Could underexposure of K20D really explain the difference?
Max