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Panasonic digital camera has inaccurate colour


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Old 08-06-2013, 21:19
Microbial
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I've just bought a new Panasonic Lumix DMC FZ-200 camera and I'm not happy with the colour rendition. If I photograph something purple, when I view it on any device it is more blue than purple. This also happens with a cheapish Nikon but not with an iPad. Other colours are fine.

Is this normal for this camera? Or digital cameras in general? The Panasonic is not a cheap camera so I really expect it to do better than this. Other than this colour issue I'm very happy with it, but am considering returning it.
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Old 08-06-2013, 22:40
alan1302
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What colour does it appear on a normal sized monitor? It may just be the colour rendition on the LCD screen on the camera is not the best. The iPad in particular does have a calibrated LCD screen - one of the reasons they cost what they do.
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Old 09-06-2013, 06:27
Microbial
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It appears the wrong colour on whatever device I view it on, including an iPad.
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Old 09-06-2013, 07:41
Tassium
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Apparently it's a common problem with digital cameras:

http://wickeddarkphotography.com/201...igital-camera/


Why the iPad camera is doing a better job I don't know.
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Old 09-06-2013, 09:05
David Waine
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Shoot RAW and use a good photo editing app, like Photoshop, to sort out the colours. As Tassium says, purple is a bit of a nightmare for digital cameras. Photoshop costs around £500 as far as I remember, but there are much cheaper alternatives. Your camera should have shipped with its own RAW processing software. I would try that for starters.
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Old 09-06-2013, 23:33
evil c
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Is it the same in video mode? Looking at a review of this camera it says that you can set up 2 custom colour sets in the White Balance menu and you can adjust the Colour Temperature. In the Colour Effects menu you can set up Custom colours.
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Old 10-06-2013, 11:13
Microbial
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I've looked into this a bit more and it seems that purple doesn't exist as a colour, it's just a human interpretation of the mixture of red and blue (http://www.davidberryart.com/articles/purple.html is interesting). Digital (and film) cameras are recording a different reality.

This makes me feel better about the camera and I'll look at pre- or post-production corrections.

The question, then, should have been "Why does an iPad's camera record purple?".
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Old 10-06-2013, 13:24
grahamlthompson
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I've looked into this a bit more and it seems that purple doesn't exist as a colour, it's just a human interpretation of the mixture of red and blue (http://www.davidberryart.com/articles/purple.html is interesting). Digital (and film) cameras are recording a different reality.

This makes me feel better about the camera and I'll look at pre- or post-production corrections.

The question, then, should have been "Why does an iPad's camera record purple?".
All digital cameras only record Red Green And Blue. LCD/ plasma displays are the same the screen is composed of pixels with 3 sub pixels again Red Green and Blue.

You can create any colour by mixing Red Green and Blue. Normally a digital camera will use 24 bit colour. This gives 256 variations for Red Green and Blue which equates to over 64 million colours. The colour of the light illuminating the scene affects how the 3 colour pixels react. Outdoor daylight is biased towards the Blue and Incandescent lighting is very Red, without compensation photos taken under fluorescent lighting look very green.

A camera has to compensate for this normally using an automatic setting. Some will let you set colour balance manually by focussing on a sheet of paper/card which is neutral grey. This should give the most natural colour rendition.

My grandsons school uniform was purple, it's quite hard to get it to look right on a photograph even when taken with a high end DSLR. Photoshop is able to colour correct automatically by you locating a neutral grey point in the picture.

The consumer end version of Photoshop (Elements) is available for about £50.00. Recommended if you are serious about digital photography.
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