100 Years in One Day - Leica M10-P Review (3) The Color

2018/09/12

100 Years in One Day - Leica M10-P Review (3) The Color

Previous: 100 Years in One Day - Leica M10-P Review (2) The Street

The first thing Leica feels to some people is a nostalgia feeling - it’s not hard to understand that Leica always reminds people of the history of photography; Usually, the second thing comes to people’s mind is its color signature. In film age, color mainly depends on film, whereas in digital age it would largely depends on the combination of sensor and firmware that converts sensor output to actual image file. No matter if it’s film or digital, lens optics also play an important role.

Professional photographers mostly pay attention only to RAW, which is the data output from sensor, it contains all possible information of the photo exposure and can be used for post processing; However, people often forget the fact that out of camera JPEG (or whatever other image format) is actually the signature of a camera’s color rendering. I happen to have a Panasonic GX9 at the moment, which I used for comparing colors with Leica M10-P, their sensors are different in many ways but the differences do not matter that much in term of color, not to mention the close relation between Panasonic and Leica.

Panasonic’s color has been critisized for being yellowish, especially the skintone, actually I found Leica’s color tends to be yellow/red as well, maybe they both try to make white skin vibrant by adding a hint of red/yellow? For Asians who have yellow skins, this does not work. Here we could more or less see a relation between the two companies, similar to Olympus and Kodak - Olympus used to use sensor made by Kodak, who is famous for Kodakchrome, and then Olympus has similar color rendering especially for blue sky.

Because of the issue mentioned above, Panasonic added a new color balance mode, similar to Olympus mirrorless with Warm Color turned off.

The photos below were taken with similar equivalent aperture, procesed in Capture One Pro using the same procedure.

Nearby cherry blossom, beautiful but finishes very soon.

M10-P OOC:

Color

GX9 OOC:

Color

M10-P Edit:

Color

GX9 Edit:

Color

M10-P OOC:

Color

GX9 OOC: (This one looks like over-exposed, but it’s actually not, according to EXIT, it feels to me that Leica as well as Fujifilm tend to exposure to the left in order to save highlight, however M43 cameras tends to expose to the right in order to get as much detail as possible in shadow)

Color

M10-P Edit:

Color

GX9 Edit:

Color

M10-P OOC:

Color

GX9 OOC:

Color

M10-P Edit:

Color

GX9 Edit:

Color

M10-P OOC:

Color

GX9 OOC:

Color

M10-P Edit:

Color

GX9 Edit:

Color

M10-P OOC:

Color

GX9 OOC:

Color

M10-P Edit:

Color

GX9 Edit:

Color

M10-P OOC:

Color

GX9 OOC:

Color

M10-P Edit:

Color

GX9 Edit:

Color

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