DPP is making things red when converting

Maximilian said:

Using DPP quite often I never had any problem like this. Only thing that comes to my mind:

1. Please check version. Latest should be 4.12.20 or higher
2. Did you check the settings of the color space? (sRGB vs. Adobe RGB, etc)
   Maybe settings in DPP and you viewer or tool for further processing are different.
3. I am assuming that you are using the same PC/display for working in DPP and viewer or tool for further processing
   Otherwise different dislpay graphic processor settings could cause problems, too. But not that much IMO.

If that is not the case, I'd contact Canon service or hope for more clever here.


On a second thought:
8000 K seem quite high IMO, depending on the lighting.
Did you try at normal AWB setting to achieve a better color using saturation and color tone ( I don't know the right name as I use the German UI)?
So getting to a more red tone.

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I looked at this some more and here's what I noticed.

As I am working with the RAW file, the thumbnail looks different from what I see in the editor--and now I am noticing I don't like what I see in the editor either. (The thumbnail actually looks exactly like what I want.) When I create a TIFF or JPG its thumbnail will also show up, and will look red. So basically, DPP doesn't thumbnail the raw files properly, but does thumbnail the others correctly. That's peculiar. I think there's a very small amount of change in creating the TIFF, but it's far less than the difference between the RAW's thumbnail and the RAW itself.

I'll check the version number. I'd be very surprised if it's fully up to date but at least it *is* 4-point-something.

Auto/Normal color balance leaves me with coins that look like dull bronze. Even setting a custom balance doesn't seem to work--dull bronze again. So I ended up using "shade" to take the picture, which at least makes them look yellow, but then it still needs to be a bit more orange to match the way the coins look in hand, so I have been adjusting anything from 8K to 10K to do it. However, I'm going to have to go back and rethink that, because that's probably where I've been introducing a lot of the redness that the thumbnails won't show. In some cases I get what I wanted, in other cases, I most assuredly did not!

In any case, my gripe with DPP right now is the RAW thumbnails don't match what has really been done with the raw files in fact. (And yes, I know the RAW files themselves haven't changed; it's just that a "recipe" is being applied to them to show me what I see...a very good system, IMHO.)

Maximilian said:

I can understand that this is giving you a gripe.
Do you speak of the thumbs that are shown within DPP or thumbs in the file explorer or thumbs in other PP SW?
Within DPP I cannot see such a problem with my thumbs.
By the way: I use DPP with Windows10 and I have a calibrated Display (Spyder).

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I'm talking about the thumbnails actually shown within the DPP editor itself (actually they're kind of large to be called thumbnails--yes they can be made smaller). My operating system won't even show what's in a RAW file at all. They DO change when I make changes. They just don't change to exactly what they should change to.

Mt Spokane Photography said:

It isn't clear to me what you are doing. Are to setting the camera to 8000K, or the image in DPP? DPP is not going to change the thumbnail incorporated in the raw file. When you save it as a jpg its a separate file. If you save it as a raw file, or tiff, it probably just brings the original jpg thumbnail with it.

I'd first look for lighting issues. If using led lights the colors can be very difficult because they can have a totally different spectral distribution so you need to adjust each color in the spectrum, not just the color temperature. Even high CRI led lights can be a problem.

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It's a Rebel T6i. I did the "custom setting" thing with it (where you take a picture of an 18% gray background then tell the camera to pick the appropriate white balance); but when I take pictures of gold with this it looks like a metallic dark tan/light brown. (By the way I am using tethered shooting with a foamboard barrier between the monitors and the setup, so there should be no light pollution from that, and of course it's at night with all other lights turned off.)

So to try to make the gold look more yellowish-orange I took the pictures with "Shade" setting (which I believe is 7000K). That at least made the gold look yellow, but actual gold, especially on old coins that have copper in the alloy, tends to have a distinct orange cast, it's an orange-yellow, not a yellow. To get that, I can go into DPP and tell it to change the color temperature to 8000K (a T6i will not let you set the color temperature numerically). That's usually pretty close, at least on my monitors; tweaking a couple of other parameters will do some more subtle changes to get closer. (Except that in some cases the coin still has a pink/red tinge.) I was able to get rid of most of my nastiest red tinges this afternoon by making sure I never set the color temperature higher than 8000K.

In any case I have established the the problem is NOT as stated in my title...it's not that the colors change when I convert the raw (plus recipe) to a JPG or a TIFF, but rather that for some reason the thumbnail of the RAW doesn't actually reflect what the raw file (plus recipe) looks like. It does change some in response to my changes, but it doesn't have the red cast to it at all and usually looks better than the actual raw file! I wish I could convert the thumbnail to a JPEG or Tiff file.

Your comment about the lighting makes a great deal of sense, unfortunately. I may have to go to incandescent bulbs, which are dimmer than these lights (but have the virtue of having a pre-programmed WB value). I should also try out my Litra.

Mt Spokane Photography said:

8000K is very blue, typical of LED's. You can get warm LED's, around 3500K. Blue LED's are missing the warm colors like yellows and reds, so the camera must boost them a lot to try and get a gray, the result can be frustrating. Have you tried using the onboard flash, or is that what you are using? The embedded jpeg's always look different from the Raw.

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Well, I might have found the problem. The LEDs I am lighting with claim a 5600K color temperature (which would be OK if it was a good spectrum) but a CRI of 80+. Who knows what the heck the actual spectrum is on those SOBs?