DSLR Color stuff

Shane Hurlbut starts a blog entry about Color Correction writing about creating picture styles for Canon EOS DSLRs. His comments about the 5D, 7D and 1D are particularly interesting:
The 5D is the king of the hill and all the others are trying to climb up to the top but they don’t even have a rope. The 7D has much more contrast, more saturation and less detail. The 1D is a very unique sensor and is incredibly sensitive. I cannot put my fingers on it but it lacks even more detail than the 7D and has a strange contrast along with gray skin tones. It has to be the small mega pixel count. So, I factor all these things into my RAW look for each camera.
But then he goes off into camera color balancing, noting that the cameras tend to come from the factory with a slightly different color "bias." He thinks it's very important to correct this, partly because these cameras are so compressed.

It's also recommended to do this if you are using multiple cameras. He balances the first camera, then takes the second and hooks them both up to calibrated monitors through HDMI, and switches back and forth until he's sure they are balanced by eye.

I probably would make a mess of it trying to balance a camera by eye, and I don't have a scope, so I think I'll avoid doing this adjustment for the moment.


Picture Styles
For those experimenting with Picture Styles, but a bit nervous or unsure about creating their own, Dermot Shane reports he's been using a 7D as his stealth camera while shooting a documentary, and likes the gamma curves from Steve Shaw at Light Illusion (cost ~$40 USD). Dermot feels they really extend the range of the footage when grading.

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