Color (colour) rendition in US Southwest Red Rock areas

[BRuke1]

I have had consistently disappointing results with DSLRs shooting in red rock areas (such as Arches National Park.) The color rendition on an iPhone 14 Max Pro is almost always truer than the Nikon DX DSLRs I use. I now take reference shots on the phone and attempt to match colors when I get home.
I’m sure that Apple has invested a lot of resources in making the phone’s electronics “see” the world the way our brains do rather than as our eyes do. I’ve also read that Nikon’s algorithms favor green below and blue above for landscape.
QUESTION: Have people found settings on Nikons that produce faithful colors in areas such as the Southwest, the Outback or the Sahara? I’ve read suggestions elsewhere that suggest amping up the “vivid” option, but my attempts have produced results similar to 1950s color postcards. (Unsatisfactory.)

[Manfred M]

This is not an easy topic to discuss and the well known colour expert, Dan Margulis has written a book on the subject; "The Canyon Conundrum and Other Adventures in the Most Powerful Colorspace" (first edition 2005, second edition 2015). He deals with issues in post-processing these types of images.

I have no experience with photography in the US South-West, but ran into a similar situation when I photographed the red sand dunes in the Sossusvlei area in Namibia using a Nikon DX camera.

I find that a lot of phones tend to "punch up" the colours, i.e. increase saturation and a lot of people like that look. When you mention the Nikon "vivid" setting, that is exactly what that does and it increases the saturation in the image. If that is the look you want, go ahead and use it. If you look at your camera settings, there will be a "landscape" colour setting and that will increase saturation a bit, but not nearly as much as "vivid".

I think you will find most of the experienced shooters on this site shoot raw data, not jpegs, to give them the control they need to get the look and feel that they are looking for. That gives a lot more data and control to fine tune the images. Dan Margulis ran into the same problem and started processing his images using the L*a*b* colour space to get those canyon walls to look right.

The correct colour is an opinion (as one of my photography instructors often said), so work with your tools to get something that looks right to you.

Could Apple have better colour science than Nikon or any of the other camera manufacturers? Possibly, but probably not. The camera company colour science was developed to keep commercial and professional photographers happy. That is not something Apple needs to worry about...

[DanK]

I agree with Manfred but would go further. Apple has control over the viewing device (their own screen). Nikon doesn't. if you have an uncalibrated monitor, all bets are off. For example, many inexpensive computer monitors have exaggerated blues, which would affect how you perceive the reds as well.

The way I would approach this is to shoot raw, including a test image with a neutral card like a whiBal to get white balance correct. Software typically gives you numerous options for an initial color rendering, some of which emulate the native ones in common cameras. However, all of these are just starting points, if you shoot raw. The main decisions about color, including hue, saturation, and the luminance of individual colors, is up to you. I find that the Adobe Color rendering is fine for many images, ut not for all.

[LenR]

I have been photographing in Utah's National Parks for many years and shoot exclusively in "raw" I agree that it can at times be challenging. Light, time of day etc all have an impact. I would recommend that shooting in raw is your best option for greater control and fine tuning as Manfred suggests, although this will require some proficiency in Lightroom, Photoshop etc. Shooting jpeg's using your cameras settings such as Vivid are somewhat limiting and tend to over saturate as do iPhones. At the end of the day it comes down to a matter of personal preference. Go with what makes you happy....

As a matter of interest I attach an image of the White Madonna, high up on a colorful canyon wall in Arches NP.........

White Madonna by Len Reeves, on Flickr

[BRuke1]

Thanks for this very complete explanation. Also the reading recommendation.
It’s reassuring to know I’m not alone with my dissatisfaction. I’ll follow up on your recommendations.

[DanK]

One other thought, although you may already know all this. The camera's capture has none of the attributes we are discussing--specific color profiles, levels of saturation, etc. The raw capture has to be processed to produce the rendered image. The iPhone does that for you, using a processing recipe that Apple's engineers decided will be most pleasing to iPhone owners. A camera like yours offers more flexibility: it offers several different recipes for different purposes, with different color balance, levels of saturation, sharpness, etc. However, they are still recipes cooked up by someone who has never seen your particular capture. So, they work fine for some images but not for others.

Automatic white balance functions differently, but it's the same basic principle: it uses a predetermined algorithm to interpret the scene in order to set the white balance. Sometimes it works well. Other times not. This depends in part on the camera. For example, the AWB in my current Canon gets things pretty much right more often than the AWB in the older model it replaced. Bit still, it's sometimes off.

Shooting raw means not using those prewritten recipes and instead doing all of the postprocessing yourself. It also allows you to change white balance and tint, treating the camera settings (AWB or something else) just as starting points. It's more work, but it offers complete flexibility. It allows you to customize the results, not only to match your taste, but also to take into account the context, for example, the nature of the light at the time.

A few years ago, I sat down with a relative novice who was dissatisfied with some shots he had taken of Arches or some other Utah red-rock setting. It was immediately clear what the biggest problem was: lack of contrast. Fortunately, he had shot raw. I showed him how to use the tonality adjustments in Lightroom and how they related to the histogram. In a few minutes, he had an image that he considered acceptable.

[BRuke1]

Thanks again to all who replied to my question. I got my start as a news photographer in the days of film and have (clearly) been slow getting my head around the subtleties of digital.
Thanks again.

[Chataignier]

Relying on auto white balance in situations where there is a strong dominant colour is likely to be disappointing. I always take at least one shot with a known white balance reference in the shot (grey card for example). That way you can correct the RAW files in pp using the grey card as a reference and copy the colour info to the other shots.

Even if you forget to do that, someone is usually wearing a white shirt or blouse and that can work as a colour temperature reference.

[Manfred M]

Let me show three different versions of Dune 45 in the Namib Desert. The shot was taken in mid-November, about 15 minutes before sunset.


Image 1 - Straight out of camera raw with minimal processing. The shot looks rather flat and is overexposed, as the light meter overcompensated for the low light conditions.






Image 2 - this is a JPEG, straight out of camera and shot using the Vivid setting. Notice how the colours have been "punched up" by the camera setting and how overexposed it is, given the time of day.






Image 3 - this is based on the same raw file as Image 1, but with a lot of post-processing to better represent the scene as I remember seeing it. The scene has been darkened to reflect the time of day and the warm tones have been exaggerated to emulate the warm colours seen at that time of day. The sky was not nearly as washed out as in the original image (the shot was taken with my Nikon D90), so I did a sky replacement to put some of the blue back into the sky.

The image does not look quite as over-processed as with the Vivid setting. I did push up the yellows and reds saturation a bit.

[Round Tuit]

Given the time that Manfred's photo was taken, here is my interpretation. Not better but different.