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Level 1

14 points

Raw Color Treatment

Hello everyone,

I've recently notice a real bad problem with color saturation in Aperture, or in the OS X 10.8.2 in general when it comes to raw files. But in Aperture, I can notice that "something" happens that destroys the picture.

Here is a movie to show exactly what I mean. I take a raw file, import it into Aperture, and for a few moments you can see the picture as it really is, before the god of ugly saturation jumps in and messes up everything:

http://cl.ly/1u2c36302d0K

So, does anyone know how to fix that? The colors as I see them in real life are like the ones that show up BEFORE whatever is happening happens.

Any help is appreciated, ty.

OS X: 10.8.2

Aperture: 3.4.2

Digital Camera Raw: 4.01

Pictures taken with a Canon 20d

iMac, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2), 27" i7 2.8GHz 8Gb 1Tb

Posted on Nov 5, 2012 11:24 AM

81 replies

Nov 11, 2012 11:10 AM in response to matthew104

What camera, please?

Ernie

Nov 11, 2012 11:27 AM in response to Ernie Stamper

Canon 5D, files are RAW+JPEG

Nov 11, 2012 11:29 AM in response to matthew104

Are you seeing anything similar with your JPEG Originals? You should not if the behavior is what has been discussed here.

Ernie

morph21 Author

Level 1

14 points

Nov 11, 2012 11:51 AM in response to matthew104

Hi matthew104,

If I may ask, choose a sample picture in which you noticed the problem, choose a portion of the picture and post some jpeg images for us.

If you could provide us with image samples from Aperture, Lightroom and DPP, since each of them have a sepparate RAW processing enigne. JPEG Originals also help.

In the worst case, if you want, just share the RAW file itself, and either Ernie or I will do a few comparisons.

Nov 13, 2012 10:00 AM in response to morph21

Hi,

I happened upon a boot volume for 10.5.8 and Aperture 2.1.4, and booted up in it. Imported your CR2, and found it to be different in the RAW decoding. Here is an exported JPEG from A2.1.4 along with the Preview from A3.4.2 again:

I will email it to you, as well. I think it is more like some of your later examples. It so, you might want to use the two different decodings for communication with Apple.

One thing I noticed while in A2.1.4, and I think earlier with current Aperture, is that changing saturation has extreme impact on the blues, but not on much else? Same for the Vibrancy slider. These deep blues are something I would love to see photographed with another camera, say a late model Nikon to get the most distance from your camera.

Ernie

Nov 18, 2012 6:23 AM in response to morph21

Thanks to Ernie for pointing this thread out to me. I'm having the same problem with photos taken with my Canon 30D. I've included two unprocessed photos (other than importing...I have not altered the stock RAW fine tuning settings). The first is from Aperture (3.4.3 running on OSX Mountain Lion) the second is from Lightroom. As you can see, the magenta in the foreground structure is way oversaturated, and the blues in the background structures are not much better off.

morph21 Author

Level 1

14 points

Nov 18, 2012 8:28 AM in response to jarrodhayes

Hey jarrodhayes,

It is interesting to see you have the same results with a different camera and model.

Would you mind trying to produce a JPEG with DPP and RPP?

Ernie also explained a very nice trick to obtain the RAW preview image within Aperture. That would also be interesting to compare.

Nov 18, 2012 10:37 AM in response to jarrodhayes

While I have not seen your images in a form that can be closely inspected, it appears that what I found in morph21's images may be true for yours. That is, only the strong colors are significantly different in saturation. What we more typically see in a comparison of camera Preview and Aperture generated Preview is that every color and shade is noticabily different, even it not much so.

Also, with morph21's image, the Saturation slider hardly effects other shades, and for the strong colors does some odd things.

Ernie

Nov 18, 2012 6:52 PM in response to Ernie Stamper

On the saturation slider, in my case it appears to be acting normally, enhancing the saturation of all colors and not doing anything particularly odd with the strong colors.

Nov 19, 2012 12:08 PM in response to jarrodhayes

I was observing results from using the slider to lower saturation.

Ernie

Nov 26, 2012 10:35 PM in response to morph21

I just had an identical maddening experience with Aperture and NEFs from Nikon D90. Can't say for sure when the color re-processing changed, but I updated Aperture a week or so ago.

Has anyone found possible way to negate the changes (short of reinstalling old Aprerture version, but I don't even know how to do that)? I could not find anything on the web more specific than this discussion.

I just can't believe Apple will pull something like this when Aperture is supposed to be used by professional photographers that care about color consistency.

Dan

morph21 Author

Level 1

14 points

Nov 27, 2012 8:09 AM in response to kavaldjiev

Dan,

I couldn't find a way to have Aperture treating the RAW pictures as I would expect. The only solution for me is, in the pictures that are bad, because not all pictures are distorted, I export the original, open them in Digital Photo Professional from Canon itself, export a jpeg version in high quality and that jpeg is then imported back into Aperture so I can continue my workflow.

It is an extra hurdle, but works.

I assume Nikon would also provide some software for image treatment. I never worked with one yet.

Nov 27, 2012 1:49 PM in response to morph21

Same thing for me! Over saturation and color shift...I prefer the un-Raw-processed version! This has been buggin me for awhile now.

Canon 5K MKIII.

Would love a fix that excludes the extra workaround of Canon's DPP back to Aperture.

Nov 27, 2012 11:34 PM in response to Bytor the Snowdog

The (obvious) problem is that going raw => jpg => Aperture mostly negates the reason for using Aperture.

I spent some time last night to match Aperture's color curves to the "master" raw as displayed by Nikon's own raw viewer/editor ViewNX2 (equivalent to Canon's DPP). The intensity mapping is non-linear and different for each of primary colors. Red and blue seemed more impacted than green, and it seems to depend also on the overall color balance. But all that might be just an artifact of the non-linearity itself -- I had patience for only 3 images as I was getting progressively flabbergasted. In any case, I could not derive simple rule how to match the color balance with set of Aperture adjustments.

This is totally ridiculous. What shocks me is that I have not heard an outcry about this from the photography community. Either there is some non-obvous trick to get the correct colors, or no professional photographer is using the new Aperture version.

I guess it's time to try Lightroom...

Nov 27, 2012 11:38 PM in response to kavaldjiev

"I guess it's time to try Lightroom..."

That is the conclusion I have unfortunately reached as well.

Raw Color Treatment