# Color balance 6D vs. 60D



## nc0b (May 2, 2015)

An experiment to compare a 400mm f/5.6 on a 60D vs. the same lens on a 6D with the 1.4X TC III (manual focus) ended up displaying a vastly different color balance. The 60D has much cooler (more blue) tones than the 6D with the TC and the same lens. I checked the Picture Style on both bodies. The 60D is on Standard (3,0,0,0) and the 6D is on Auto (3,0,0,0) which has the same values as Standard (3,0,0,0) I don't know what "auto" does vs. "standard" since the numbers are identical. I had to reduce the 6D files size in Photoshop to 60% so both files were 2.7 MB. I cannot imagine the 1.4X TC III is the cause of the tonal differences. I have never adjusted Picture Style settings on either body. Any suggestions as to what's going on here would be appreciated.


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## jrista (May 3, 2015)

What happens if you put them both on Standard? I suspect "Auto" is doing something more than Standard, hence the difference. Testing should tell.


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## beforeEos Camaras (May 3, 2015)

was the iso and shot setting the same? besides standard and auto?


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## nc0b (May 3, 2015)

Both shot at ISO 400 and with auto white balance. Shutter speed above 1/1000. I'll do another test with both on "standard" to see if that is the dominant factor. As far as the original purpose of the test, about half of my shots with the TC on the 6D (manual focus) were sharp. Would definitely prefer a body that could handle f/8 AF with center point if I was going to use the TC on the 5.6 lens very often.


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## Marsu42 (May 3, 2015)

nc0b said:


> Both shot at ISO 400 and with auto white balance.



That would most likely be "it", do check if the cameras chose the same wb setting on both shots - and for further comparisons, set a manual wb on camera.



nc0b said:


> Any suggestions as to what's going on here would be appreciated.



Probably also the result of different jpeg engine tunings of the cameras, I don't think jpegs are supposed to give identical results across cameras - better try raw, the raw converters (DPP, ACR, ...) might be give more consistent.

In any case, crop vs. ff, ancient 7d1-design 18mp vs. newest ff 6d are hardly to perform the same color-wise. The picstyles aren't meant to act like icc profiles or color calibrations, but just give different types of "pop" to your sooc shots. There's a reason ppl go to lengths with color cards and tuned workflows to get the actual colors of a scene.


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## Sporgon (May 3, 2015)

'Standard' picture style on the 6D produces a warmer, slightly richer colour than 'standard' on the 5DII. I presume Canon are continually tweaking these profile to produce a better OOC JPEG. Certainly that's one area where there has been continual improvement. 

Sorry that should have been 'neutral' picture style. I very rarely use 'standard'.


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## beforeEos Camaras (May 3, 2015)

the 6D dose not af at f8 in live view? on the 70d it will and the 60D


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## Marsu42 (May 3, 2015)

beforeEos Camaras said:


> and the 60D



No it won't, not unless you trick it into believing it's not f8 with taped pins or a Kenko tc.


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## nc0b (May 3, 2015)

I just shot some comparisons with the 6D on picture style on "Auto" vs. "Standard". There is quite a difference with more chroma and a warmer hue on "Auto" than on "Standard". "Landscape" has a modestly bluer sky, but somewhat less chroma. "Neutral" is really bland, with "Faithful" a bit more vibrant than "Neutral", which I like the least. 

Auto may exaggerate the chroma, but I prefer the overall appearance of the scene. The "Landscape" picture style option would be my second choice, particularly if one likes bluer skies. These subjective comments are made using an HP DreamColor Z24x display and nVidia Quadro K2200 video card using a DisplayPort connection. 

As far as an option to use live view, I have never tried that with wildlife, particularly if they are on the move. The 60D with the bare 400mm f/5.6 focuses fine any way. It was the 6D, 1.4X TC III and the 400mm that won't AF. Even if a given body could AF with an f/8 lens combination, could live view track a running antelope or a flying raptor? 

By the way, I get much better results with the 6D & 400mm with BIF than the 60D using the center focus point in either case.


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## beforeEos Camaras (May 3, 2015)

Marsu42 said:


> beforeEos Camaras said:
> 
> 
> > and the 60D
> ...


ok did not know that thought the differences was just a few more focus points and lens adjustment and the duel pixel thing for movies


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## Mt Spokane Photography (May 4, 2015)

Marsu42 said:


> beforeEos Camaras said:
> 
> 
> > and the 60D
> ...



Are you sure?

Most of the current Canon cameras will AF at f/8 in liveview using contrast detection. They won't when using phase detect.


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## privatebydesign (May 4, 2015)

nc0b said:


> The 60D is on Standard (3,0,0,0) and the 6D is on Auto (3,0,0,0) which has the same values as Standard (3,0,0,0) I don't know what "auto" does vs. "standard" since the numbers are identical.



They are very different, the numbers are the same but that is additional tuning, like the bass and treble on a stereo that also has a graphic equaliser. The equaliser sets the overall tone for the style of music, you can then tune a particular album with the bass and treble. Standard and Auto are different base (equaliser) settings, you then get the Sharpness, Contrast, Saturation, and Color Tone to further customise from that base setting.

AWB is another killer. To compare true sensor differences you need to take two RAW files and put them into PS using the same settings in ACR.


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## Marsu42 (May 4, 2015)

Mt Spokane Photography said:


> Marsu42 said:
> 
> 
> > beforeEos Camaras said:
> ...



Right, of course the 60d works in Live View - I though that was a given so my statement only was for phase af. Contrast af doesn't depend on the aperture, but simply on detecting ... well ... contrasts, so it fails only if the image drowns in noise.


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## jrista (May 4, 2015)

nc0b said:


> Both shot at ISO 400 and with auto white balance. Shutter speed above 1/1000. I'll do another test with both on "standard" to see if that is the dominant factor. As far as the original purpose of the test, about half of my shots with the TC on the 6D (manual focus) were sharp. Would definitely prefer a body that could handle f/8 AF with center point if I was going to use the TC on the 5.6 lens very often.




If you shot both on AWB, then that right there can result in differences. Changes in light over even a few seconds can have an impact on color balance with AWB. It is also likely that both cameras actually have different tone curves in the picture styles, even though they may be the same two picture styles. To get a more consistent, comprable result, use a fixed WB setting (say daylight), use the same picture style (personally I use Neutral), take RAW images with each camera, and compare them at the same WB setting in ACR or LR. Then you should be able to get a better idea of what the differences in each camera are when it comes to color.


It should also be noted that color with cameras these days is more a matter of mathematics than sensor technology. The technology does play a role, and it is certainly nice to get better color strait out of the camera, but in the end, color is what you make of it with sliders and curves in post. With a program like LR, you can create user profiles to automatically apply certain settings to every image imported off of any camera. So you can tweak the color of a few images from each of your cameras, generate a user profile when you have the default settings you want for each one, and apply those profiles when you import. Your color would not only be consistent camera-to-camera, but it would also be YOUR color, every time, automatically.


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## memoriaphoto (May 5, 2015)

jrista said:


> It should also be noted that color with cameras these days is more a matter of mathematics than sensor technology. The technology does play a role, and it is certainly nice to get better color strait out of the camera, but in the end, color is what you make of it with sliders and curves in post.



Generally I don't disagree, although I have a feeling that color quality out of cam might be the next rising DR discussion thing. At least I hope so. The hunt for good looking files at ISO 25 600+ has made reviewers out there color blind (no pun). Thinner CFAs on the sensors let more light in, but the color accuracy suffers. Most people probably don't think about it since the profiles today are poppy, contrasty and make most images fly with very little effort. But anyone with focus on color and especially those with older Canon generation experience will tell you that color and the subtle "look" has gone downhill in the Canon department lately. If it matters or not is very personal of course.

Needed or not, the upcoming 5Ds/r seems like an improvement in that area though.


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## privatebydesign (May 5, 2015)

memoriaphoto said:


> jrista said:
> 
> 
> > It should also be noted that color with cameras these days is more a matter of mathematics than sensor technology. The technology does play a role, and it is certainly nice to get better color strait out of the camera, but in the end, color is what you make of it with sliders and curves in post.
> ...



What utter drivel.

There is no such thing as _"colour straight out of camera"_ the information contained in a RAW file is colour agnostic, it isn't until you demosaic it and render it that the rendering program assigns colour values to the pixels. Anybody that thinks _"those with older Canon generation experience will tell you that color and the subtle "look" has gone downhill"_ clearly needs to learn how to make camera profiles, which takes about 15 seconds in total with a couple of seconds at capture time.

Colours are what you make them, you can tune your software to reproduce colours exactly as you want them and different camera models and brands (and lenses) can be used interchangeably with consistent colours.


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## memoriaphoto (May 6, 2015)

privatebydesign said:


> What utter drivel.
> 
> There is no such thing as _"colour straight out of camera"_ the information contained in a RAW file is colour agnostic, it isn't until you demosaic it and render it that the rendering program assigns colour values to the pixels. Anybody that thinks _"those with older Canon generation experience will tell you that color and the subtle "look" has gone downhill"_ clearly needs to learn how to make camera profiles, which takes about 15 seconds in total with a couple of seconds at capture time.
> 
> Colours are what you make them, you can tune your software to reproduce colours exactly as you want them and different camera models and brands (and lenses) can be used interchangeably with consistent colours.



I didn't say that you can't tune colors to whatever...I said that different models have different output - Lightroom, Aperture, C1 whatever. A custom profile is a good start but it doesn't change how the sensor/CFA handles the light. Newer models have less steep filters in order to let more light on the sensor. And, depending on how, what and where you shoot, this could be negative.

DXO actually has a section for this. And it is quite obvoius that newer Canons are not performing as well as older ones. Which many confirm in real life. *However*, as I said....most people probably don't care and it might be personal depending on what you shoot. But it doesn't mean that it isn't true...or, as you so kindly put it yourself..."utter drivel".


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## jrista (May 7, 2015)

memoriaphoto said:


> jrista said:
> 
> 
> > It should also be noted that color with cameras these days is more a matter of mathematics than sensor technology. The technology does play a role, and it is certainly nice to get better color strait out of the camera, but in the end, color is what you make of it with sliders and curves in post.
> ...



This is what a RAW image looks like strait out of camera:







A bayer matrix. It doesn't really have "color"...to have color, it has to be demosaiced. Demosaicing, however, doesn't give you what most people think of as "strait out of camera" color either:






THAT is true "strait out of camera". GREEN. Twice as many green pixels as red or blue result in a very green image when all you do is demosaic and give the demosaicing algorithm a CFA pattern (RGGB in this case). 


What do you do to fix that? Run the data through a bunch of complex mathematical algorithms. The whole entire notion of strait out of camera color or strait out of camera quality is pretty much a misnomer. The biggest camera factor in IQ is noise. The amount and characteristic of the electronic noise in a camera DOES play a role in IQ, but when it comes to color...that's pretty much all math.






This image required both demosaicing with a pre-made camera profile in Lightroom, which applies a complex multi-channel tone curve to the image. I then further processed color using saturation, vibrancy, and per-color channel sliders to get the color I wanted. 

There is no such thing as out of camera quality. It's all an illusion produced by a bunch of math to hide the true nature of what data *really *comes _strait out of the camera_.


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## privatebydesign (May 7, 2015)

"This is what a RAW image looks like strait out of camera"

It isn't, it has far too much luminosity, a 'naked' RAW file is much darker, your file has had a gamma curve applied whereas RAW files are linear gamma 1.0. I do agree with what you are saying re color though.


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## jrista (May 7, 2015)

privatebydesign said:


> "This is what a RAW image looks like strait out of camera"
> 
> It isn't, it has far too much luminosity, a 'naked' RAW file is much darker, your file has had a gamma curve applied whereas RAW files are linear gamma 1.0. I do agree with what you are saying re color though.




True, I did "stretch" the data, as it was nearly black. It was not a gamma curve, however...I just manually pulled up the data until you could see the bayer pattern. PixInsight, the tool I used to process, doesn't apply ANY modifications to the data on it's own...all edits have to be made by the user.


This is the original RAW data:








No stretching, no gamma curve, no processing of any kind. Raw bayer matrix loaded without even any color channel data implied to the CFA.


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## privatebydesign (May 7, 2015)

Just keeping it accurate!

Hopefully when people see how dark a well exposed image actually is they will start to realize why there is so little information in the dark shadows and that tonality will always be an issue when shadows are raised significantly. Let's get true 16 bit RAW files ASAP!


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## jrista (May 7, 2015)

privatebydesign said:


> Just keeping it accurate!
> 
> Hopefully when people see how dark a well exposed image actually is they will start to realize why there is so little information in the dark shadows and that tonality will always be an issue when shadows are raised significantly. Let's get true 16 bit RAW files ASAP!




No kidding. Astro CCD cameras use true 16-bit data, and they have very good noise characteristics (for manufactuers like QSI and FLI, it's extremely close to a true Gaussian distribution...no banding of any kind, and extremely low hot pixel counts). The data is WONDERFUL, even deep down into the darkest tones. I would LOVE for my DSLR data to look like that.


I usually have to stack a couple hundred RAW files from my 5D III before my astro data starts to get that good. 


For the record, I do believe PixInsight loads data into a 32-bit float space. I'm actually not sure how that affects the base rendering. This image was QUITE dark...even for an unmodified RAW. I might be able to get it to load in 14-bit native space...kind of curious how it will look, because some of the highlights were pretty close to clipping in a number of these photos.


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## memoriaphoto (May 8, 2015)

So let me see if I get this straight. You claim that all RAW files are pretty much the same in its original state and that there's no such thing as "camera/sensor character". It all boils down to profiles and RAW conversion software? Meaning that if I take a 5D Classic and a 5D Mark III and use a Color Checker Passport in the same environment and then start shooting, the output in Lightroom for example, will be virtually the same (with the exception of the higher res in the 5D3)?

Just a reminder that I was referring to how a sensor and CFA reacts to different light and a steeper CFA has better potential to read the scene more accurately and hence produce "better" colors. Are you saying that this is also BS if you have a custom profile for the converter of your choice?

Now, I know there's no such thing as "color" per se in a RAW file but I would have thought logically that it contains "color instructions" to the software and those instructions are not the same due to different color filters and in-camera processing.


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## jrista (May 8, 2015)

memoriaphoto said:


> So let me see if I get this straight. You claim that all RAW files are pretty much the same in its original state and that there's no such thing as "camera/sensor character". It all boils down to profiles and RAW conversion software? Meaning that if I take a 5D Classic and a 5D Mark III and use a Color Checker Passport in the same environment and then start shooting, the output in Lightroom for example, will be virtually the same (with the exception of the higher res in the 5D3)?



The output in lightroom will be all about how LIGHTROOM processes the data. There are likely to be minor differences due to differences in noise levels and characteristic, chroma noise can impact the fundamental color cast of an image, but overall...what you see as a result of those two images being processed in Lightroom is what LIGHTROOM ITSELF does to the data. Run the same experiment with DPP...you will get obviously different results compared to the Lightroom test, and the magnitude of difference between LR and DPP will be greater than the magnitude of difference between the two cameras. Same goes for using Aperture, or RawThearapee. 

It's MATH. Everyone uses different algorithms and different curves when they process the data...so what your seeing on screen has far, far less to do with the camera hardware, and far far more to do with the mathematics that drive these programs. 



memoriaphoto said:


> Just a reminder that I was referring to how a sensor and CFA reacts to different light and a steeper CFA has better potential to read the scene more accurately and hence produce "better" colors. Are you saying that this is also BS if you have a custom profile for the converter of your choice?



A stronger CFA reduces color cross between pixels. That means each pixel represents a purer color. When standard algorithms such as ADH are used with data that came from a sensor with a stronger CFA, color noise should be lower, which will reduce any color cast caused by that color noise. As I said, IQ is more about noise.



memoriaphoto said:


> Now, I know there's no such thing as "color" per se in a RAW file but I would have thought logically that it contains "color instructions" to the software and those instructions are not the same due to different color filters and in-camera processing.



There is metadata in the RAW about white balance, and possibly color profile. Outside of DPP, most RAW editors ignore any color profile metadata. Most will apply white balance, but again, the algorithms to achieve a given white balance in LR are different than in DPP which are different than in Aperture which are different than in RawThearapee. 

Color is, if I had to distribute it among causes, is 95% math, 4% due to color cast due to color noise, and 1% hardware. We aren't talking about film here, where the chemical makeup of the film, or the chemical bath used to expose it, or the color characteristics of the lens matter. It's digital data. It's a matrix of numbers assigned color ranges like red, green, and blue. You can over-weight red, and under-weight green, and leave blue normally weighted, and completely change what the color looks like once the image is demosaiced and rendered. 

It's all about the math.


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## Marsu42 (May 9, 2015)

jrista said:


> The output in lightroom will be all about how LIGHTROOM processes the data. [...] Run the same experiment with DPP...you will get obviously different results compared to the Lightroom test



LR only has camera _emulation_ modes (see "camera calibration, last item in Develop module) and doesn't claim to do 1:1 identical output to each and every camera - but looking at my 6d and 60d the results happen to be pretty close to each other.

As this camera calibration has such a vast impact on the look of the raw conversion, it's all about personal taste anyway unless you shoot with a color card to get a dng profile, "neutral" might con people into thinking it's "unprocessed" or "real".


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## Valvebounce (May 9, 2015)

AAARRGGHH BUMP
That was me falling into that trap! ;D

Cheers, Graham. 



Marsu42 said:


> "neutral" might con people into thinking it's "unprocessed" or "real".


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## jrista (May 9, 2015)

Marsu42 said:


> jrista said:
> 
> 
> > The output in lightroom will be all about how LIGHTROOM processes the data. [...] Run the same experiment with DPP...you will get obviously different results compared to the Lightroom test
> ...



Aye, LR/ACR are incapable of exactly reproducing the picture styles of the camera. That was entirely my point...that when you see "out of 'camera' color" in a photo you have loaded in Lightroom, your not seeing what the camera rendered...your seeing what *Lightroom *rendered instead. Similarly, even DPP will not produce exactly the same color as Canon's own cameras, as the curves are not 100% identical, nor is the precision of the hardware executing the algorithm identical.

What you get out of the camera as a JPEG is mostly the result of in-camera algorithms and tone curves that process the RAW data coming off the sensor. Compression algorithms affect the IQ, the color, the quality. Trying to exactly match the literal Out-Of-Camera JPEG with RAW would be difficult and time consuming. 

Sure, there is a natural response of the silicon to light, and there are slight differences in the actual RAW ADU coming off the sensor due to differences in CFA. But the significance of those differences pales in comparison to the algorithms that convert those RAW pixel values into full color RGB values in an actual image rendered to a screen.

I am actually amazed at how neutral Samsung NX1 data seems to be when it's rendered (by anything, LR or Samsung's own RAW Converter software). It's the only camera I know of that renders blacks as deeply and purely without any visible color cast:







Even the Nikon D7200 and A7II both have some color cast, and the 6D has a lot of color cast. The NX1 doesn't have the lowest noise, but man, I would take that totally neutral color and super deep, rich blacks any day over all the rest.  I don't know how they did that, but it's a pretty amazing feat if you ask me.


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