Red/Pink color shift on import from Canon RAW

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Red/Pink color shift on import from Canon RAW

I love how Aperture works, but I am having an issue that I have battled with for the past several months. When importing photos from RAW (Canon 5D Mk III and 5D Classic) there is a very strong pink hue present in the image. The strange thing is, that it doesn't start the import like this, when the images are first imported I can see the correct color (minus whitebalancing that needs to be done), but after a few seconds the colors take over. There is some color profile being applied to the images that I don't want. I've tried to counteract this color shift using the hue slider for reds under Adjustments. Anybody else have this issue, or know what to do about it?

If you look at this screen shot, you can see the first two photos have had the profile applied (this is before any editing):

Aperture 3, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3)

Posted on May 3, 2013 11:17 AM

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Answer 1

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William Lloyd

Level 7

21,311 points

May 3, 2013 2:39 PM in response to Jerome87

The color shift ALWAYS happens on import to Aperture. That's because the first thing you see on import is the in-camera JPEG. After a few seconds, Aperture generates its own preview based on the RAW data, which is *guaranteed* to be slightly different than the in-camera JPEG because Aperture doesn't have access to the camera vendors "conversion recipe."

So you will always see a shift, no matter what.

So the question then is why is Aperture's rendering pink? There are a few possibilities:

1) You may have a preset that's applied at import that's doing this shift (double check your import settings)

2) You have some sort of color profile applied or are soft proofing - double check you aren't doing that

3) It could be an issue with Apple's conversion. If you can't fix it by white balancing then you may wish to use Aperture's "send feedback" mechanism and send a couple troublesome images to Apple. They may or may not respond but at least they'll be aware of the issue you're seeing.

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Answer 2

Jerome87 Author

Level 1

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May 3, 2013 2:49 PM in response to William Lloyd

Well the strange thing about that, is when importing into Adobe's Lightroom, I never have this issue. This can't be fixed with white balance, the pink hue is always there. I never selected a new color profile, so shouldn't the default be without the pink hue? Does anybody else shooting with Canon have this issue when importing RAW? How would I check if a different color profile has been selected by default?

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