Foveon Color differences?
As a general rule, your camera shouldn't have too much of an impact of the look of your photos if you are shooting in RAW and should reflect what you are trying to accomplish.
The one exception in my experience has been the Sigma Foveon based sensor cameras. (Samples)
The reason being that because they infer color quite differently than the normal Bayer pattern cameras and there is generally more room for them to not get the same color under similar conditions. They seem to be less accurate, but sometimes in ways that I find desirable.
That said, in most situations this should be mostly compensated by editing choices. As a matter of practice, I figured I would try and match my two most commonly used cameras at the current time.
My Panasonic S1R and the Sigma SDQH
What's actually interesting about these two cameras is that the Panasonics effective 47mp, and the SDQH's 38mp (Stacked) should work out to have a similar performance in resolving details as the Bayer pattern gives up a some of its potential resolution compared to Foveon style.
I cropped everything to 4x5 and used that step to adjust for the correct FOV as the 45mm and 35mm Art lenses used don't perfectly match in terms of FOV so the images are slightly different resolutions.
The details of the final crops are in the table below:
Additional notes:
The SDQH images were converted into DNG using Kalpanika.
Images are edited in Capture One.
Editing was as follows:
- White Balance was matched on the same spot.
- SDQH was adjusted for highlights/black point/contrast
- Sharpness was lowered to 50% of the Capture one Default as the default is too much
- S1R images where left with the defaults for NR/Sharpness
- S1R images where adjusted to match the SDQH edit without complicated local adjustments/masking
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| Example with Before/After for both sets. Showing the OOC RAW rendered in C1 by default and the attempted match in look |
And with that basic context as to what was used and what was done, the images between the two.
SAMPLES
Lake Bridge
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| 1:1 crop of some differences |
Apartments
This one has some moiré on the brickwork.
Forest
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| The Shadows really show the noise and color failure for the SDQH |
Trees
Ivy
Final Notes
I didn't want to provide too much direct feedback, as I think people can form their own opinions. This is a pretty straightforward test, and I think it's a good exercise to try shooting and editing the same thing with different cameras.
There is still a tendency for colors that look similar from a standard Bayer camera to end up being a bit more distinct in the SDQH images. Particularly between Greens/Yellows in vegetation. That was the place trying to match was generally more difficult without resorting to local adjustments.
The other big difference was the trend for the SDQH colors to begin to fall apart in the darker sections of an image that the S1R simply didn't experience.
But otherwise, at least under sunlight, you generally can end up with very similar results without too much effort.
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