After using Canon dSLRs and Canon’s Digital Photo Professional (DPP) for many years I feel very comfortable adjusting white balance, levels, color and saturation. I have tried other RAW editors such as Adobe’s ACR in CS3, Lightroom, Bibble, C1 Pro and C1 LE; time and time again DPP had better color, more detail and cleaner files. There are some areas where I was very happy with the 1Ds Mark II’s coloring:

1. •Auto White Balance (AWB) is very good in outdoor settings. On rare occasions I would adjust the AWB slightly, but 99.97% of time AWB was (and still is) spot-on.
   

2. •Skies are usually a deeper, cooler blue - not a pastel or “baby blue” color. The pictures in the Banff gallery are good examples of the typical sky blue from the 1Ds Mark II.
   

3. •Greens and yellows in foliage have nice separation; rarely does foliage look mushy or globbed together. Each tree or bush had nice separation and definition relative to its neighboring tree or bush.
   

While generally happy with Canon’s coloring, reds have been a recurring sore spot - in particular with skins tones. Skin looks too red and requires considerable editing to achieve a more natural looking tone palette. Balancing color fixes one aspect, but often compromises another. The shadow areas such as the neck, the gradients under the arms and legs, etc. can be quite ugly too. In a word - REDS!

PHASE ONE P25 AND WHITE BALANCE

With the Canon 1Ds Mark II as relative benchmark, how is the P25 doing? Lets be up front about this, the P25’s auto white balance is horrible, bordering on useless. A blind person could guess better than the P25. Until the right white balance is found any other color editing is pointless, so setting the white balance is my first step. Comparing images from the 1Ds Mark II and P25 (pictures of the same scene at the same time), the P25 tends to be 1500K to 3000K warmer.

In my experience shooting a gray card for landscapes is pointless because there are many different light sources - there is the direct light, light passing through foliage (picks up yellow & green tints), light reflecting off the ground, light bouncing off adjacent structures/objects. Pleasing white balance is an ART, not a science. A gray card is one tiny point in the entire scene, the odds of that point being the “right” point is slim. If the gray card has 10,000 pixels allocated to it and P25 has 22,000,000 pixels - the odds aren’t looking good.

Up to now the 1Ds Mark II made these decisions for me and did a good job. With the P25 I have to decide on the best white balance, so for golden hour light (the light about 1 hour before sunset) I have come up with the following:

1. •A general Kelvin range of 4800 to 6200 as a starting point
   

2. •With K values closer to 4800, a green tint in the of -7 to -12 range works well (using C1 Pro 3.7.7)
   

3. •With K values closer to 6200, a green tint in the range of -3 to -8 works well
   

4. •Images with many shadow areas tend to benefit in a warmer K setting
   

5. •In the field the P25’s WB is set to “Daylight”.  It  is a decent setting for reviewing images on the spot.
   

LENS CAST - THE UGLY TRUTH

My only lens at the moment is the Mamiya 80mm F2.8 AF, and it produces lens cast. Phase One attributes lens cast to how the lens projects light onto the sensor. If light hits the IR filter & sensor at an oblique angle, then a cast will be produced. In general I agree with their explanation, but I think the P25 sensors also have an inherent cast too.  How much cast is related to the lens versus the sensor is something I plan to explore in the coming months.

With the P25 there is slight shift towards a green tint on the left and slight shift towards a magenta tint on the right. For landscapes this means that blue skies tends toward “baby blue pastels” on the left and a stronger, deeper blue on the right.  Clouds may pick up greenish tint (on the left side of the image) and a magenta tint on the right side of the image. Finding the right white balance while managing lens cast is a delicate balance since the white balance tint value can accentuate lens cast.

Too lessen lens cast C1 Pro (and the new C1 Version 4) incorporates a lens cast correction profile (called a “LCC” profile). The cast is not eliminated, but it can be minimized to varying degrees of success. The first step is a GOOD LCC profile. I have created 20 or more profiles for the 80mm lens and have found it to be more art than science. Some photographers shoot an LCC profile for each image; I’m not that dedicated yet. My most effective “universal” profile was created by:

1. •Two strobes with softboxes positioned about 5 feet from a white wall.
   

2. •The softboxes faced the wall with a slight angle towards each other - maybe 5 degrees.
   

3. •The goal is to illuminate the wall as evenly as possible.
   

4. •The AFDII was focused to infinity, metering was set at +2 EC.
   

5. •A B+W 4X graduated filter was rotated to the right side.
   

6. •The graduated filter forced the right side of the frame to be slightly darker.
   

7. •Aperture set to F11.
   

8. •Lens focused at infinity.
   

9. •The white diffuser panel held flush to the lens hood (no light leaks).
   

10. •Repeat the process a second time with lens focused at 4 feet.
    

So far these two profiles have been the most effective ones and work well on most images. The process should be repeated again for portrait orientation, but so far a third LCC profile created in less controlled conditions has been working fine. In searching the web for lens cast information, these were some additional suggestions:

1. •The lens cast profile needs to be of the same WB as the image it is applied to.
   

2. •Some people create a profile for each aperture.
   

3. •Profiles needs to be taken at the scene under the same lighting conditions.
   

I tried these suggestions and the degree of improvement has been negligible - if any. If an image is very important I probably will shoot a lens cast profile anyway just in case. For now I am pretty happy with my “universal” F11 workhorse. The degree and frequency of a lens cast depends on many factors. Mamiya is releasing new “D” lenses optimized for digital, so maybe these new lenses will produce less cast - or preferably have none all together.

I have found the P25+ Outdoor Landscape profile to work better than the P25 Outdoor Landscape profile. The P25+ has less magenta hue to it, and when a good white balance is set along with the “universal” LCC profile - my lens cast issues are minimal. Finding a good white balance and applying the “universal” LCC led to ~70% improvement. Using the P25+ Outdoor Daylight profile improves the situation to the 85% or better range. I suspect Phase tuned up the P25+ profiles to mask lens cast, but that’s the conspiracy theorist coming out of me.