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Color catastrophe avoided

Gorgonzola

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When I got home from our South West vacation trip and viewed for the first time pictures taken with my Fuji X-T2 camera, I was shocked. I discovered that dozens of photos were severely color distorted -- horribly skewed to the magenta ...


SML-Zoin-Magenta.jpg


I was appalled and fearful that many pictures were irretrievably damaged. First I wanted to know what happened. After long investigations and consultation of Fuji forums I discovered that somehow (???) White Balance had been Fine-tuned to the most extreme Magenta setting.

X-T=fine_tune.jpg

X-T=fine_tune_WB.jpg


I have no idea how this might have happened as this setting is well down in the menu structure. In any case I corrected the setting and the camera has worked fine ever since.

But what to do about the "ruined" pictures? Perhaps they could be corrected. Turns out the process was easy though it took a lot of experimentation to get the correction right. I use the simple Irfanview image editor and applied corrections as shown:

Irfan-correction.jpg


The result was pretty good -- maybe not perfect but pretty satisfactory...
SML-Zoin-corrected.jpg


Fortunately I didn't have to process each of dozens of photos separately: the Irfanview 'Thumbnail' batch processing facility to change them all at once.
 
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fpitas

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We all see vacation memories through rose-colored glasses.
 

LTig

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When I got home from our South West vacation trip and viewed for the first time pictures taken with my Fuji X-T2 camera, I was shocked. I discovered that dozens of photos were severely color distorted -- horribly skewed to the magenta ...
[..]
I was appalled and fearful that many pictures were irretrievably damaged. First I wanted to know what happened. After long investigations and consultation of Fuji forums I discovered that somehow (???) White Balance had been Fine-tuned to the most extreme Magenta setting. [..]
]But what to do about the ruined pictures?
If you did shoot raw you can reprocess them with the correct white balance.
 

NTK

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No, I've never gotten into RAW. Maybe someday I'll experiment with it. Meanwhile my JPEG results are generally quite satisfactory.
Raw is the camera's sensor output. It is like the mic feed of a recording session. JPEG is like the final eq'd, low bit rate compressed MP3 version. IMHO it is much more preferable to JPEG simply for archival reasons.

For example, the Fuji RAF raw format are 14 bits, which means it can support 2^14 = 16k levels for each red, green, and blue channels of each pixel. (Not saying that your camera's sensor outputs are true 14 bit.) JPEG only support 8 bit = 256 levels, and it is lossily compressed. Raw files give you much better post processing flexibilities than JPEG. You won't have the white balance problem that you had because white balance adjustments are made after the raw file is captured (i.e. raw sensor output).
 

voodooless

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Make sure to enable picture effect preview, then you know while shooting that something is wrong.
 
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Gorgonzola

Gorgonzola

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Make sure to enable picture effect preview, then you know while shooting that something is wrong.
Yes, a very good suggestion what I didn't use when taking those picture. A problem, though, was that I had no idea at the time what the problem was or what had caused it; my first thought was that something was wrong with the camera.
 

JeffS7444

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Well, I have downloaded and installed both Camera One 22 (that's supposed work with Fuji RAWs) and also Fujifilm X RAW. Now I need to take some RAWs photos and try them out. ;)
Don't be surprised if you are initially underwhelmed by what you see, because a good raw capture tends to look flat and kind of "blah". Worse, you may notice more lens aberrations and noise too, as these had previously been automatically corrected by your camera's JPEG engine.
 
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Gorgonzola

Gorgonzola

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Don't be surprised if you are initially underwhelmed by what you see, because a good raw capture tends to look flat and kind of "blah". Worse, you may notice more lens aberrations and noise too, as these had previously been automatically corrected by your camera's JPEG engine.
I say to RAW enthusiasts that I'll give it a try. For a lot of casual photographers -- and I include myself -- it may add a layer of nuisance that they don't need all or any part of the time, not to mention that many cameras and most (or all?) smart phones don't support RAW. For me RAW will be useful for relatively critical things such as portraits, important close-ups, and vacation photos, but not so much for casual family pics.

Folks have pointed out that the problem I had in the original post would have been a non-issue if I used RAW. OTOH, per se RAW wasn't necessary to correct the extremely rare and anomalous problem that I encountered. (I still can't figure out how my cameras 'Fine-tuning White Balance' setting has changed; it certainly wasn't anything I intended).

Folks who use basic equipment that supports only JPEG still have tweaks they would like to make. Advance smart phones have remarkable built-in features these days, but I personally would find it very awkward trying to do things on a tiny scree. The much larger RAW files are prohibitive for some users though they aren't a particular problem for me.

For these poor souls, there is nevertheless tools to tweak photos. Personally I use the Irfanview editor extensively; it was adequate to correct the problem I described at the top of this thread. Adobe Photoshop Elements works well for more sophisticated corrections and tweaks but much cheaper and easier that full-blown pro tools.

I've done quite a lot of scanning prints, negatives, and slides. For these things RAW is irrelevant (at least in case of my equipment). For these applications I do recommend saving to the lossless TIFF format especially if further tweaking is likely; the tweak versions can be saved as JPEG.
 
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