"Problems with Red"
As this is a very complicated subject I will probably regret trying to answer it, but here goes.
First off remember that everything you see either on your camera or on your PC monitor is the result of digitally encoding information. Basically your camera records a set of instructions that tells other devices what it was that it saw when you pressed the button.
All colours can be made by mixing the three primary colours of Red, Green & Blue although it requires the addition of Magenta & Cyan to give the full range of what we would call True Colour. What we mean by this is that it has a depth of 24-bits per pixel and a total of 16.7 million colours.
Digital cameras use known colour profiles to generate their images. The most common is sRGB or Adobe RGB. This along with all of the other camera data is stored in the Exif header of the Jpeg file. This Colour Space information gives the graphic programs and printers a reference to the colour profile that the camera used at the time of taking the exposure. In other words it supplies the relevant code information to view the picture
Digital images approximate the realism of the colour and the process is referred to as colour depth, bit or pixel depth. Most computers can display the same number of colours that the human eye can discern, about 16 million.
Most cameras, monitors, printers and scanners usually come with a driver disc for Windows and Mac systems that includes ICC profiles for that particular device.
The International Colour Consortium (ICC) sets the standard guidelines for colour management in the imaging world. Again simply put, Colour Profiles allow one piece of hardware or software to know how another device has created its colours and the way they should be interpreted or reproduced.
A good example is Epson’s Print Image Matching (or PIM) which is a standard of embedded colour printing information for digital cameras that is added to the Exif header of the picture.
Colour Balance. Is the accuracy with which the colours captured in the image, match the original scene.
RAW files store the unprocessed image data directly from the camera's imaging chip to its memory. RAW image files must be processed with special software before they can be viewed or printed, often they come with the camera software or programs such as Photoshop.
With RAW files you have the ability to alter the white balance, exposure value, colour values, contrast, brightness and sharpness as you see fit before you convert this data into the standard JPEG or TIFF format.
So as you can see there are many reasons for you to see one thing with your eye, another with your camera and a different picture on a monitor or when printed or scanned. As I said in the beginning, it is all down to digital information being recorded and then decoded by different devices, similar to a person trying to describe all the colours in a picture to another person who has to paint it without looking at the scene.
Although everyone is working to the same standard there will be some variations, as the old saying goes “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” and so is colour. The wonderful Water Lily paintings by ‘Monet’ were probably the result of him having cataracts in later life and not realising that the colours he was using were not what he intended to paint, but to his eyes it looked OK.
All cameras will behave differently and I am afraid that some colours especially ‘red’ will always give problems, have you ever tried getting a good picture of Bluebells? now they are a problem!
I do find that bright sunlight often gives varying reds, so a bit of shading helps, otherwise its back to adjusting your colour via the old PC.
Well those are my thoughts on the subject, but I am sure that someone more knowledgeable can add to this.
;);)
very crisp with a nice black sky.