I’m having a color issue with my RAW files (CR2) from my Canon 5DMkII.
Last night I shot a rock concert. The lighting was pretty crazy, lots of blues mixed with some reds here and there. I was right up front in the pit in front of the stage. The images looked fine in the viewfinder.
Problem is that when I got home and transferred the files to my Mac and imported them into Aperture, they changed, and became unusable. For a moment, the previews looked fine, then when they each finished processing, they were messed up.
Essentially the hottest areas of the image that are red or blue are blowing out creating an effect similar to that of the cheesy thermal imaging effect in Photo Booth. When I export to JEPG from Aperture, the images look the same as the RAW files did.
Trying to figure out what was going on, I opened up the source files in the Preview app. The thumbnails looked fine, but when I opened them they looked the same as in Aperture.
I tried re-importing the files in different ways and got the same effects. I opened the files in Photoshop and got the same results.
What I did discover is that if I open the files in Digital Photo Professional, the software that comes with the camera from Canon, the RAW files display fine. Furthermore, I can use that program to convert the RAW files directly to JPEG and those files seem to be working fine. But I’m stuck with JPEG files.
I took a couple nighttime interior shots tonight to see if it was something obvious with my camera or camera card, but those shots looked perfectly normal. I can’t easily re-create the intense stage-lighting conditions, however.
Another photographer shooting beside me had no such issues. She uses a Windows machine. I sent her the RAW file and it seemed to work fine on her system, opening it up in lightroom. I opened mine in lightroom and got basically the same results as in Aperture and preview.
I tried the images on another mac running the same OS (10.6) and got the same bad results.
Any thoughts on what might be going on here? I never experienced any issue like this before.
Here’s how the photo looks when converted to a JPEG with Digital Photo Professional. It basically matches what the viewfinder looked like:
http://www.jeremiahhill.com/ImagesforExternal/i-m7HQgCh/A
Here’s how the photo looks as a RAW file, and as exported as a JPEG from that RAW file through Aperture:
http://www.jeremiahhill.com/ImagesforExternal/i-fN2sMHF/A
And please note that this is just a random shot I grabbed, probably not one of the images I’m actually going to use. The ones shot under this blue light seem to be particularly affected by the phenomenon. Other shots that didn’t have the blue light, or another intensely red light that was sometimes on, do not seem effected.
This is an old post and you have probably figured it out or moved on. In case you haven’t, here is one possible reason why you are getting clipping in your images.
Aperture’s Onscreen Proofing may be setup incorrectly for your monitor. If you have a Wide Gamut profile selected for Onscreen Proofing, and your monitor is not a wide gamut monitor, some colours may not be displayed correctly. Colours that your camera can record, but your monitor cannot display will be displayed with the closest colour your monitor can display (clipping).
Try using a different profile like sRGB or AdobeRGB (or turn off onscreen proofing, entirely) and see if that corrects the problem. If it does, you just need to select an appropriate colour profile for your monitor (or printer).
Hope this helps.