Colour treatment in Aperture and Phocus

[Hywel]

Hi All,

  As I've mentioned here before, I have a rather high volume workflow, publishing shots for my subscription website: I need to generate a set of photos every day, something like 50 shots (taken from 75 or so shot, usually). This means days spent in front of the computer batch processing 500+ shots in the day. So I'm always on the lookout for ways to streamline my workflow. Something that saves ten seconds per shot can win me half a day a month.

  At the moment I am using an unholy mixture of programs. For Hasselblad shots, I keyword with Phocus at the end of the day's shoot, then at some later date I run Phocus again to "develop" to 16 bit TIFFs, doing the colour correction, exposure and creating the basic "look" for each set. I then import to Lightroom 3 beta 2 to rate the shots, select my main and preview images for each set, and do basic retouching: dust removal, but also skin retouching. I also use the Portraiture plugin for this. Then I export to final output (JPEGs for the website, in sane 1600 pixel and full-sized versions).

  Unfortunately, I also have sets shot on a mix of different cameras to deal with: Canon 5D2, 7D, 40D, etc. These I currently handle completely within Lightroom.

  There's a few problems with this workflow. The main one is simply that Lightroom's interface sucks (I know, personal taste, I just don't get on with it). Specifically I don't like its keywording interface anything like as much as Phocus'. I also find its brush and retouching tools extremely primitive... one suspects Adobe are protecting photoshop

  It also means a mix of programs, which is always slower, and huge TIFFs to be created as intermediate steps. I can't keep the TIFFs either- at 180 MB each I'd be filling a 1 TB drive every couple of months. That is prohibitive given that everything has to be backed up multiple times including offsite, and it would be a real headache to asset manage.

  Which brings me to Aperture 3. I really liked Aperture 2, but its architecture simply wasn't up to the job of processing Hasselblad files in bulk, and I never liked the way Hasselblad shots looked by default in Aperture. (Weird colour casts, especially on skin tones which usually look rather green).

  Aperture 3 has removed the architectural limitations, and its retouching tools are STREETS ahead of Lightroom's. Its keywording doesn't play nice with imported keywords (it won't recognise them as a heirarchy) but that wouldn't be an issue if I moved over to using Aperture for everything. The one thing that stops it being a one stop shop for me is the colour rendition. (It doesn't have DAC either, but shooting at f/8 with the 80 mm lens as my default I can't even see the effects of DAC, they are so subtle).

  Which bring me to the point of this long rambling post. I can't believe I'm the only person to discover that the default rendition of skin tones from Hasselblad shots in Aperture is a bit dodgy. How have other people dealt with this? I spent the evening playing around and got an almost identical rendition from Aperture and Phocus, which is very encouraging, but until I've done some more work I won't know how dependant on the scene that is.

If I can just use one preset to click and get a Phocus-like colour rendition from Aperture on import for all my shots, I'll be a very happy bunny. So happy that I will probably stop using Phocus unless I hit something really problematic (I dare say Phocus will do a better job if I really cock up the exposure or something, but for shots which are basically right in camera Aperture may be fine).

(Of course, with Phocus 2.5 about to be released and capable of handling non-Hassy RAW files, it might be that Phocus will become a universal step in my processing- although I doubt it. I don't want to be exporting TIFFs for all the Canon files unnecessarily).

How do other people deal with skin tones and colour rendition of Hasselblad files in Aperture?

  Cheers, Hywel.




 

 

[Hywel]

... answering my own question, sorry, but as a few people have read the thread they may be interested.

My hypothesis is that it is to do with how Aperture does its white balance on import. Phocus takes its colour balance from the setting on your import preset or I guess it defaults to "as shot".

Aperture does not appear to default to "as shot" for FFF files, nor does it read whatever white balance information Phocus may have written to the file on import. Instead I believe it makes a first guess at a white balance itself.

So one photo with white balance setting of 5003 K tint -10 as shot, imported to FFF with my studio default preset of 5500 K tint +10 is imported by Aperture, which assigns it a new setting of 4823 K tint -28: a pretty random, and wrong, setting. It assigns the same colour balance to every shot in a set, though, which is interesting.

Whatever algorithm Aperture is using seems to do well on shots of models in landscapes with blue skies and green vegetation as well as skin, but really badly on models in plain studio settings... even though they had the same camera white balance settings and the same preset applied in Phocus upon import.

So I suspect Aperture is ignoring white balance information in the shot metadata and making it up, and it gets badly fooled by shots like model on burnt out white infinity cove or plain black cove. I think it is trying to counterbalance the preponderance of orange/brown/reddish skin tone and ends up making everything too green and usually too cold as well.

Knowing this, it is easy to fix- neutralise on something grey in shot, or just pull the white balance to somewhere around 5500 K and tweak the tint by eye. The other settings I usually apply (S-shaped tone curve, etc.) are easily handled and the resulting shots look similar enough to pass muster for me in most cases. I've just edited a dozen or so sets purely using Aperture from the FFF files, rather than intermediate TIFF, and they look really nice.

I might start using a grey card for white balance at the start of sets in tricky conditions, though. Would be good practice to do anyway I guess!


 Cheers, Hywel.