Canon Picture Styles and Chroma Du Monde

Canon Picture Styles and Chroma Du Monde

I was curious about the real differences on the video level between the various Canon HDSLR Picture Styles so I set up the DSC Labs RED CamBook Chroma Du Monde 28R and evenly lit it with ambient daylight.

Converting the camera's HDMI OUT to SDI, I set the exposure in the recommended way for the chart, putting the grayscale's crossing point at just under 60% on the waveform. I then made no exposure changes and just dialed through the various Canon Picture Styles capturing the waveform and vectorscope data from the Leader monitor.

Camera and Lens: Canon 5D Mark 2, Canon 24-105mm f/4 Zoom

All styles were adjusted to the following "standard practice" specs:

Contrast: all the way down

Sharpness: all the way down

Saturation: down 2 points

For Neutral and Faithful, the two "out of the box" Picture Styles that I find to be well suited for video, I looked at Saturation -1 as well to see how much difference 1 point makes on the scopes. The answer is a lot. Most people would agree that the colors on these cameras are over saturated and need to be backed off a bit to look more natural and less video. When adjusting a video camera's colorimetry using DSC charts, the theoretical goal is to ensure faithful color reproduction by aligning the primary colors into their targets. The color response that this creates however may not be suitable for all projects it may even look a bit over saturated compared to the low sat "film like" color matrices found in many prosumer camcorders.

Have a look:

Let's have a closer look at Faithful, Saturation -1

This is about as close as we can get to hitting our targets with the Canon 5D Mark 2. In my opinion this setting doesn't look as nice as Saturation -2 so as always, your eye is really your best tool for image evaluation.

Canon Picture Styles: Looking at these thumbnails alone, it's a little hard to tell the difference.

Waveforms: Glancing at these however you can see that there is a small difference in gamma response from Style to Style, Neutral being the most compressed in comparison.

Vectorscope: Even with the saturation turned down, Portrait and Landscape are very extreme color looks compared to the more muted tones of Neutral and Standard. Faithful on the other hand, does what it say it does and offers the most accurately aligned video colors of the bunch.

In order to really see the differences though, you need to look at the chart in the context of video. Here's a file for you, feel free to download it and take into FCP where you can open up the scopes and really scrutinize the differences between Picture Styles.

Note: RED CamBook has a highly reflective surface so must be angled back to avoid seeing yourself in it which is why the image is skewed in this video. . There is a small amount of gamma lift that happens in Vimeo upon conversion to their format. Why does it do that? I don't know and I'm still searching for a workaround.

Canon 5D Mark 2 Picture Styles and Chroma Du Monde from Ben Cain / Negative Spaces on Vimeo.

As for the Canon 7D and 1D Mark IV? From what I discovered from the tests Jem and I did at Sekonic, the color response from the various Picture Styles is very similar to the results found here.

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DSC Labs' RED CamBook

DSC Labs' RED CamBook

I recently obtained one of these new RED CamBooks and in my opinion, it's one of DSC Labs' most useful products to date.

http://dsclabs-us.intelex.ca/product.php?product_id=143

While this product does bear RED's name, seeing as how there's no way to adjust RED's colorimetry in the camera other than some basic phase, saturation, and white balance controls, I fail to see why this is marketed as a "RED specific" tool. Yeah you can shoot the chart and use it to make picture adjustments after the fact but because it's a full 28 swatch Chroma Du Monde chart that fits it your laptop bag, it's also incredibly useful for painting and matching traditional HD video cameras. The other small cambooks DSC had sold prior to this don't have the full range of video colors as found on the full size CDM 28 chart.

This small "to go" Chroma Du Monde is exactly the same as the full size version in terms of video colors and tonality. Because of the size it can easily travel and if you find yourself matching cameras in a hotel room in the middle of nowhere, you can now do so with a far greater degree of precision than with the older, 6 or 12 video color CamBooks.

A new feature to the chart is the addition of 6 super saturated, non-calibrated primary colors on the outside of the CDM. This is apparently a feature RED requested as the Chroma Du Monde colors are low saturation and intended to be normal, life-like colors (hence the name, "Color of the World"). The 6 non-calibrated colors are intended to be used as a visual reference so you can quickly glance at the monitor and confirm that the camera is still seeing high-sat even if you've calibrated to the low-sat colors. It's an interesting feature. I personally haven't found myself using it but you never know.

I recently used the RED CamBook to have a look at the new RED Mysterium-X sensor across the entire range of camera ISO's and made some very interesting discoveries. Until next time..

Update

on 2010-07-13 04:35 by Ben Cain

Nice to see there's quite a bit of online activity at the moment regarding the RED CamBook. Maybe I wasn't clear enough in my original post but yes, I do realize how this product was intended to be used with the RED and that is to align the camera image to the chart or multiple cameras to the chart in post production. With a camera like this, the emphasis is always on what can be done with the images in post production though with the new RedColor color science and RedGamma, you can now get much closer to your preferred look right in the camera. However like I mentioned, because of it what it is, a full swatch Chroma Du Monde, it's also very handy for use with more "conventional" Rec709 video cameras.