The Art of Color... Science?

Summary

The Art of Color…Science?by RC Jenkins (see previous guest posts)IntroColor science is an art.And we’ve been getting a lot of crayons lately. And not the stupid ones in the 4-pack from some kid’s party that are basically just plastic and break. The good ones that just smear colors onto the page.The biggest headline feature of the ZR is probably R3D NE (raw video format); but nobody actually cares about the technical format. It might even be pretty much the same as .NEV. What really differentiates it from .NEV is the color science that it contains. (But what exactly does this mean…? That was rhetorical.)And not long before that, Nikon started rolling out “Flexible Picture Controls.” And before that, were the Advanced Picture Controls, which were themselves more advanced than the regular Picture Controls.And during all of this, we had the fanboys bashing Sony’s colors or praising Fuji’s ‘Film Simulations’ and Canon’s colors. Which is always tinted a bit ironic when the same people brag about shooting raw and editing in Lightroom. But that’s a different topic. Or is it…? Hmmm…You can’t paint without laying down some primer. So let’s put down a quick layer of primer on the raw material. What are raws?RawsRaws are a (lowercase) type of image file. Each photosite (~pixel) on almost all sensors can only measure an amount of light–it cannot measure the color of that light, the direction of that light, etc. Think about that. Critical thinkers will start to form a picture of the implications: ‘So if our sensor’s photosites can only measure the amount of light, doesn’t that make them black-and-white only?’Yes, it does. We have black-and-white sensors. And our raws are black-and-white images. huhhh?The “raw meat” is the linear value that each pixel recorded; and it’s usually 12- or 14- bits. Which means a precision of either 4096 or 16384 shades of grey, per pixel. This is better than 50 Shades of Grey. I was obligated to add this dated and irrelevant reference somewhere.But th...