In the case of Lightroom, relative to the deviations in the M8 actual image from the last post, we see less negative deviations overall, indicating more saturated colors, and a significantly more saturated red patch. However, overall the picture is relatively similar to that of the M8. This starts to imply that differences in color rendering really are more to do with the raw conversion software, and less to do with different cameras.
Aperture shows a somewhat different picture. The 1.1 rendering of the M8 showed some large positive spikes in the blue component of several patches, especially the yellow patch. This doesn’t appear on the D80 rendering. However, the red component is the cyan patch is quite negative. The 2.0 rendering shows considerable change relative to the previous V1.1. Firstly, most of negative deviations have gone – the largest negative deviation anywhere is in the red component of the cyan patch, but even this is well down from the previous value. Overall, the 2.0 D80 rendering appears significantly better controlled than the previous version.
Capture One is an interesting case. At a first glance, it appears that the rendering is simply a considerable distance away from the theoretical values, almost all color components appear to be greater than the theoretical values would indicate. The peak deviations are over 20 units, in sharp contrast to Capture One’s rendering on the M8 image, in which the deviations are of the order of 10 units. However, a closer look shows that what has actually occurred is that the pattern of deviations has remained very much the same, but that their magnitude has grown, and been offset in a positive direction. What this amounts to is that the image is considerably brighter overall. This is a strange result, and one that I’ll come back to in my next post.
For the moment ignoring the issue of the Capture One brightness, we can draw two conclusions at this point:
- Most of the color variation that we see appears to be due to variations in the calibration of the raw converters, rather than variations between camera brands. The Lightroom M8 and D80 color renderings look a more alike than, for example, the color renderings of the M8 using Lightroom and Capture One.
- Aperture 2’s color rendering appears to have been significantly improved, at least in a technical sense, relative to the previous versions of Aperture.
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