Hi there, it’s good to found out that Sony cameras are equipped with such a powerful tool helping photographers shoot JPEG SOOC, and so excited to bought recipes from Alex, who is so professional in color.
Yeah I’ve downloaded the PDF from the payment email and tried several recipes on my Sony A6400, and problems came out. I set every options as pdf says, and the colors seems so far from the example image above. After that, I watched almost all the shot tutorials on YouTube, knowing that is quite normal colors seem different on different machines and environments, and the colors need to be adjusted.
Sounds quite dumb that I am still confused how to match the colors after reading several blogs( Maybe my English is not good enough, and some of the videos lack subtitles 😂😂I’m Chinese by the way).
So here are what confuse me:
I see four color blocks under the example image, are they used for matching the color?
How should I adjust the options after I first set all the options as the pdf says?
Which colors are my targets? Which image should be the target? How should I know if my setting is close enough to the targets.
Suggested kelvin is provided, and looks like far away from normal figures , how should I adjust the kelvin and color filter to keep the color still correct after moving from an environment to another?
So sorry that asked so many questions, I just really don’t know how to use the recipes correctly. Hope I expressed myself clearly. Excellent job by the way, I wish explore a new world here, starting from use the recipes correctly 😁
Hei! Your english is excellent and you explained everything clearly. Also, don't worry, it doesn't sound dumb if you have difficulties matching colors between Sony cameras. If it was that easy, it would have taken me a lot less to create these film simulations. Altought there is a steep learning curve, it gets a lot easier when you understand the basics of color. I will try to make a video on this topic, it might be easier to understand like that. Till then, I will try to explain through text.
This will be a lengthy response, so buckle up.
To explain this as easily as I can, I will ask you to focus on 2 characteristics of color, temperature (cool, warm) and tint (green, magenta). This will simplify everything and help us see the problem in our image, and understand where to push our settings to counterbalance the colors.
Here is a color wheel. It encompasses the full spectrum of colors seen by the human eye.
We can categorize all these as warm colors, and cold colors. Let me cut the wheel in two so it's easier to see.
If your colors fall in either part more than the other, it means it's either predominantly warm or predominantly cold. By knowing this, we can understand and determine in which direction we need to push colors to get the type of colors we need.
As your camera shift through the whole temperature range (2500K - 9900K), your colors will be shifted towards either colder, or warmer colors.
I also added a scope screenshot to easily observe how colors are shifted with the kelvin change. In this situation on the colder end, colors like Yellow green and blue shift towards Cyan, while reds shift towards magenta, because it is dragged towards colder colors, and the colder version of red is pink, not orange. And as we go higher on the kelvin ladder, color start shifting towards Amber. That means yellows and reds shift towards amber, greens towards yellow, and blues towards magenta.
This is an extremely important lesson to learn, for understanding how to shift colors inside the camera without the use of a Hue slider.
If your blues are rather magenta, greens are olive and yellow reds are rather orange, it means your image is predominantly warm. (Image 3)
If your blues are accurate or shifted towards teal, greens are shifted towards teal, yellows shifted towards green, and reds towards pink or magenta, it means your image is on the cold side. (Image 1)
Whenever I want to match different cameras or create a film simulation, there are 4 colors I always check first. Reds, yellows, greens, and blues. I compare these colors from the reference and in my image, with the purpose of understanding what is the color cast of my own sensor compared to the reference.
When matching film simulations on different cameras, you need to look for differences in all these colors to understand where your colors are situated in the spectrum, and understand how to balance them out with the help of the temperature, color filter, and color phase.
When creating or matching film simulations, here are 2 questions which I ask myself all the time:
Are the colors too cold or too warm compared to the reference? What is the tint of the image? Is it magenta or green?
Now a practical example, let's take this image as a reference for our film simulations. It has rather accurate colors, so it's will be easier to understand the technique when compared to an 'uncalibrated' image.
And this is the image coming out of our camera. Let's compare.
Look at the Reds, yellows, greens, blues and see if you find any differences.
How are the colors compared to the reference? Are they colder or warmer?
If you look overall you will notice there is a blue predominance over the whole image, and if we check the color scopes, you will notice the reds are shifted towards pink, yellows towards green, greens towards teal and blues are rather accurate, so as a final conclusion the image is rather cold. That is because all the colors are shifted to the colder half rather than the warmer half. A warmer image would have had reds and yellows shifted towards orange, blues to magenta and greens shifted towards olive.
Now that we know our sensor is colder than the reference, we can raise the temperature by a couple steps 'till we hit the sweet spot.
Reference:
Fixed Kelvin:
It looks better, but now the blues are a bit shifted towards magenta compared to the reference. So what can we do to fix this?
Use the Color Phase to shift colors clockwise, or counter clockwise.
I raised the color phase to positive values to shift the blues from magenta towards teal. But keep in mind, the Color Phase will shift all the colors in the chosen direction.
As I lifted the Color Phase to positive values, that means Yellow shift towards Orange, Reds shift towards pink, magenta towards blue, blue towards teal, and green towards an olive-yellow color.
Now the colors are a bit too magenta, so additionally, slightly push the color filter towards complementary colors to balance out the tones, in this case, Blue-Green. Since we pushed the color phase to positive values, this will shift reds towards pink, green towards olive, so we need to push the colors back into place with some blue greens in the color filter.
It's better, but now the image is a bit colder, so I'll raise the temperature by 200 Kelvin.
Final results:
And that is my workflow in matching colors between cameras.
Now before you go, there is an interesting thing which I call extreme point color shifting, which basically means each sensor will have different color mapping at extreme temperature points like 2500K or 9900K.
Examples:
Some cameras will be teal, others blue or even magenta. Same at 9900Kelvin, cameras will have different color mapping and that is because Sony, just like every camera brand, keeps improving their color science with each new release.
From my experience, at 2500K the a7III will be Magenta, the RX100 will be Teal, while the Sony a6700 will be well-balanced in the middle.
To fix this, use the color phase to shift color clockwise or counterclockwise, and match your Sony colors to the reference.
I will choose to match all cameras to the a6700 at 2500K, as it's the most balanced one. So on the a7III I will raise the color phase to positive values, while on the rx100VI I will lower the color phase to negative values. This will help me bring all cameras in the middle in terms of color hue.
When creating or adjusting recipes, I am constantly going back and forth between these 3 tools to finely push and pull color in different directions.
I hope this tutorial helped you gain insight on how to match colors on multiple cameras. If you have more questions, leave them in the comments below.