Some of my last posts were concerned with color. I’m sure you recognized 🙂
Juha’s statement, that he’d probably try to tinker with the LX5’s so-called “film modes” to achieve more natural greens, made me look one more time at those modes. I went out on the balcony, leaned against a pillar, framed an image to contain grass and architecture, and then shot a series of images, one per film mode. “STANDARD” (nope), “DYNAMIC” (eeee!), “NATURE” (no), “SMOOTH” (not really), “VIBRANT” (yikes!) and finally “NOSTALGIC”, the last color mode.
Nostalgic? It was a tad low on contrast, but the colors were pretty spot on. Probably slightly off in white balance, but when I immediately compared reality with what I saw on the LCD, I was amazed. This was very near to what I was looking for.
I increased contrast to +2, decreased saturation to -1 and decreased noise reduction to -1 and that’s what I saved to the custom preset “MY FILM 1”.
Today’s image was made with these settings, and in Photoshop I have just set white balance, added a tiny bit of contrast (“Linear Contrast” curve in “Luminosity” mode), sharpened the image and added the frame.
The interesting thing is, it’s not only the grass, the reds are spot on as well, and it’s not only the wall or the fire extinguisher or the plastic box, it’s all the reds.
I’ll be using this mode from now on. Let’s see if there is a catch, for instance the image falling apart under certain lighting conditions. I suppose not, but you never know. But then: what did they think? “Nostalgic”??? Is it a matter of old age to want natural colors? And why not simply call it “Natural”, instead of their “Nature”, that is far off from natural? Anyway, I’m glad that I found it. Thanks to Juha for the hint!
The Song of the Day is “Green, Green Grass Of Home” from the 1968 Johnny Cash album “At Folsom Prison”. Hear it on YouTube.
Juha Haataja (2011-06-25)
With the LX3, there were a lot of problems with natural colors in the beginning. Tweaking the nostalgic film mode was the way to go, but one needed to change the auto WB as well; I think it was the green-magenta axis you needed to tweak a bit. But then there was a firmware update which changed things; no need to tweak WB, and even standard mode was borderline acceptable if you did some changes there. It may be different with the LX5, but your hint on using nostalgic sounds good.
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