Which Camera System Has The Best Color – Canon, Nikon, Lumix or Sony?

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Hey, it’s Jay P. here from The Slanted Lens. I’ve got Barbie here with me. “Hi”. She’s getting married today. “I am!” I don’t think her boyfriend knows about this actually. So we have Barbie here. We put her in a white dress because we want to look at color. We want to look at color on her face, on that white dress and we’re going to look at color on four different cameras. We’ve got the Z8 from Nikon, we’ve got the S5II from Panasonic, we’ve got the R6 II from Canon and the a7R V. I love all of these cameras. I’ve tested all these cameras. And the thing I have noticed is as I shoot on these that the color science is becoming very similar. You get a very beautiful image from each one of these cameras. And it’s starting to be where I can’t tell the difference. So using my secret weapon, the Datacolor Spyder Checkr Photo, we’re going to put these cameras to the test. We’ll shoot an image on each one of them. And after we process them in Camera RAW, I don’t think you’re going to be able to tell which camera shot which image. So let’s see it. Should we do it Barbie? Yeah, let’s do it!

So one of the main reasons that I wanted to do this test is because there are a lot of different scenarios where you are matching two different cameras. Either in an interview situation, a wedding shooter will have a second shooter that comes and has their own camera and not going to necessarily have the exact same camera system that you have. So you have to have a way to be able to at least get the color and the editing close so that you don’t feel like you see two different shooters at the wedding. So using the Datacolor Spyder Checkr Photo, I love the fact that they’ve come out with this small compact device to be able to carry with you. Just set this in as you do the first few shots together. It’ll help you get your two cameras matched and a little closer to each other.

We’re going to take a look at just how close you can get them. I think they’ve become almost imperceptible. So when I shoot landscapes I don’t use the color, I use the gray scale. And that just allows me to hold this up and get my first shot as the sun’s changing, as the sun’s coming up. And allows me a reference point where I can see what neutral color looks like. And allows me to give me clean color. I’m using a polarizer and a gradation filter and I put this in the front to get that first image.

And now I can look at color when I get back to the studio in Camera RAW or Lightroom. And from there I can make my color corrections and decisions. So this isn’t going to make decisions for you, but it’s going to give you clean color and allow you now to creatively do the editing that you want on the image.

So the Datacolor Spyder Checkr Photo comes in a nice hard case so you can carry it with you. I was standing on a bridge one day doing a photograph in the morning as the sun’s coming up. A photographer pulls out a little scrap piece of paper. It was a cut off piece of paper of a gray card and it’s bent so it’s not getting a flat surface. And I’m going, “Dude, what are you doing?” This is wonderful because it’s just, it’s protected, it’s small. Carry it in your bag. And it gives you a hard flat surface to be able to give your color reading off from. And it just works really seamlessly that way. So I love the case and the ability to travel and to have it be protected. So I think the case makes it worthwhile. Nice and small so you can carry it. And that’s really what’s important to me.

So the Spyder Checkr Photo’s color palette allows you to take this into their software in Datacolor software and now you can make color profiles. And we’re going to do some of those to see how our images match. So we’re going to take that and see how it works. Let’s get to it.

All right, there’s our final outcome. I’ve taken all these images into Camera RAW using the Spyder Checkr Photo. I was able to manipulate each one of them. I’ll show exactly how I did that. But here’s our final outcome. So I want you to look and decide which one of these is which camera. Which is the Nikon, which is the Canon, which is the Panasonic, which is the Sony? So here we go. Give you a couple of minutes to look at them, 1, 2, 3, 4, make your guess. Let’s see which one’s which.

So maybe it’s worth noting that the 48 color patches here, they’re arranged in an order and the hues that make it easy to give you a comprehensive color. So it’s just, it’s kind of a given with this kind of color chart. But just so you understand that there’s a reason for each of the different colors, different hues. The colors, the gray scale, gives you the ability to see a complete range of color. So when you’re sampling and looking at color it allows you to see that color and to see how it’s going to render. And that makes it really easy to go in and just select and to see the different colors and see if they’re true color. It’s an easy device to use because it’s small and compact. You can carry it with you and it’s just that small version I think makes it more worthwhile. It’s hard to keep that large one with you when you’re out working. Even in the studio it’s easy to pop this in. I found that it’s just in the bag, pop it in, easy to get that, get a quick color chart in the shot because it’s so small and easy to use.

So the Spyder Checkr Photo works really seamlessly with the Datacolor software. You can bring that software up in Lightroom. You can bring it up in Camera RAW to be able to create color profiles using all the different color squares and create a profile that you can save and use and apply later. So it really works seamlessly. The software does with any of those platforms to give you a really true color. So using that you can create your custom profiles that you can save and apply. So if you have two different cameras that you use, an A and B camera, you can have a custom profile for the B and the A to make sure that they match. You can apply those when you’re in different situations. You may have to create other profiles depending on the lighting situations. But sometimes you can create a profile that’s going to get you really close and allow you to get close to color and close to matching. And that gives you a place to kind of bounce from to be able to do a final edit. Kind of fine-tune it before you go into all your posts.

All right, now you made your guess. Let’s see if you’re right. So let me show you how I process these images. I brought them all up, I brought the one with the Spyder Checkr Photo up with an image from the shot we did of her. So I have two of each of the images here. I chose, I looked at the Lumix color which I absolutely love. I looked at the Nikon color which I absolutely love. Those are the two colors I like the most. I think I actually like the Canon color the least. The Sony color was probably third in that process. So in looking at those I just decided, okay, we’re going to use the Nikon as our test. So using the Spyder Checkr Photo I punched in tight. I went through the process of sampling the second square to give me the color which gave me 5100 degrees. 5100 at plus 14 for tint. Then I did an overlay. The overlay allows me to now make a second color choice here. First for exposure. Probably set it about 230. Then for blacks which try to set it around 10. I’ve got a bunch on there. It looks like I was messing around with it when I was trying to explain it. So that’s how we set the Nikon. And then I just looked at it and said okay, do I like the color on her face? Do I like? I think it really got us very, very close. So we had this as our preset. I set a preset for Nikon and applied it to the image. And that was my beginning image. That’s my test image. I’m going to try to match everything to that. I took and opened that up in preview so now I can see that on the side over here. And I just simply took that preset that we set for each one of these. I went through each one of the different cameras. I went through the Canon and I created its own preset from the Spyder Checkr Photo. I went through each one of them, the Sony, the Canon, the Lumix and gave them their own preset using Spyder Checkr Photo. Now I set all of them to that preset. But then as I looked at them compared to the Nikon they were not that similar. So I went through the process of just making some final adjustments. I started to kind of lean towards, because Nikon was set at 5100 degrees for temperature and plus 14 for tint, I kind of leaned towards that. So looking at the Sony, or the Canon I went to 5,000 at + 16 and I pushed the saturation up just a little bit. That’s the only one I did the saturation up just a little bit to get it to match more the color. Now is it perfect? It’s not perfect. If I went into color grading I could get these a lot closer. But I just want to do this in just your general numbers so you can get a quick color using the Spyder Checkr Photo. And it got me really close using just that, just the basics. So I went to the Lumix, very close to, I went 5050 and plus 14 which is really close to 5100 plus 14 that the Nikon had. That Lumix and the Nikon are very similar color. I got a beautiful color with that. Then with the Sony I had to mess with the Sony a little more. I went to 5,000 plus 16. I didn’t do any saturation. It’s pretty good. It’s pretty close there. So that’s how we got to each one of them. So here’s our Sony color and our Canon color, our Lumix color, our Nikon color and our Sony color. So let’s put those back up and you see which one is which.

Why am I doing this? For a couple of reasons. The sensors have gotten so close to each other that I feel like the color is really similar. It’s not hard to correct. You can create a preset, especially using the Spyder Checkr Photo, you can create a preset you can apply to another camera to be able to get it very similar to, you know, a second shooter to the camera, the main camera that you’re using. So it’s not hard to match different cameras, I don’t think. Canon has always had very orangish kind of color and they’re kind of moving it more towards a more neutral, a more kind of pleasing color. Nikon has always had beautiful color. So has Panasonic. Just, I think those two cameras have really beautiful color. The Sony has been trying to catch up and it has. It started to, the color on the Sony is looking much closer to that of the Nikon and the Panasonic. And I think it’s a much warmer, much more pleasant color and very easy to correct to get back to just a beautiful color. So I created these presets. Now I can use them in the future if I say, okay, if I feel like this is kind of maybe I would say, “Okay, here’s my Sony preset to make it look a little more like Panasonic.” That’s probably what I’m doing right there. That is exactly what I’m doing. Or make it look more like Nikon. And that’s going to give me the color. Because sometimes when I look at color on the back of the camera on some cameras and I just think it  just doesn’t inspire me. It doesn’t make me feel excited. Whereas with Lumix and with Nikon I certainly feel like it’s a lot more exciting to look at on the camera.

So you can match these without any problem. Sensors have gotten so close together. I hope you’ve enjoyed this. It gives you a good idea on the fact on showing you how you can certainly make these match. We’re just using the Spyder Checkr Photo to get us in the right kind of world. And then we’re correcting just the last little adjustments to be able to get them to match exactly. Create a preset. Now you can apply those to your images and it’s going to give you color that really matches between different, two different platforms. All right hope you enjoyed this. Keep those cameras rollin’ and keep on clickin’!