It’s Time to Retire the Term Colour Science
Glossary of Photographer’s Woo Part 3
The Glossary of photographer’s Woo is a series about dispelling persistent myths in photography, specifically, we target loosely defined terms that often hinge on appeals to expertise such as suggestions that only advanced, superior photographers can notice these qualities.
These qualities generally benefit niche or luxury brands and are perpetuated by marketers and loyalists in place of tangible or specific evidence. Previous articles have addressed Microcontrast and Low Element Count Lenses, Today our target is Colour Science.
Colour is a science, but I would argue that the term ‘colour science’ has fallen victim to semantic bleaching: the useful meaning has been stripped and a secondary, dishonest meaning has taken its place.
Note: Writing from Australia, I will be keeping the U in Colour throughout this article. Spelling in quotes and titles will be kept in their original format.
Lexical colour
In online parlance colour science refers broadly to the way specific brands may impart their specific fingerprint on the colouring of images shot in their specific cameras. Canon and Fujifilm are understood to have ‘good colour science’ whereas Sony’s is bad and Nikon’s divides opinion.
“It’s not a myth. It’s hard to explain unless you spend a lot of time with all kinds of footage.
Canon footage has the most consistency in reproducing accurate skin tones and colors regardless of the environment and lighting.
I find I spend much less time correcting and grading canon footage as compared to Panasonic and Sony cameras. This is why they are a popular choice for documentary filmmakers.
The most noticeable characteristic for me is the balance in tint between greens and magentas. Sony footage is either too green or too magenta and when you try to correct it in post it’s a battle to not make people look sickly” — Anonymised Reddit Comment
“I don’t think that anything really beats what Canon is capable of doing. No matter what, skin tones come out looking warm, gorgeous and lovely even when using Daylight white balance (what film is balanced to) and in not so ideal of a scenario. More importantly, this idea goes across the spectrum for all sorts of skin tones–and that’s incredibly important. What this means is that no matter what kind of lighting you’re in, those skin tones are going to look super nice.” — Chris Gampat, Opinion: Canon Gets Skin Tones Right Where Sony and Fujifilm Still Fail
Colour Science is Real
Colour is a science. The problem is that the science of colour is not what is referenced when most people cite ‘Colour Science’.
“Chatter about “my color science” or “their science” usually comes down to one party’s specific, subjective approach to a challenging engineering problem that involves color theory. How do I process this particular film stock? How do I build a perceptual transform from P3 to 709 color space? How do I algorithmically convert Standard Dynamic Range footage into a High Dynamic Range image that is pleasing to look at? How to de-mosaic this particular camera’s RAW sensor data?”
These are difficult and interesting problems to solve. They all involve knowledge of color theory. But one party’s preferred approach should really not be described as their science. It is merely their technique, their algorithm, their solution, or their product.” — Blinded by Color Science, John “Pliny” Eremic
A huge degree of scientific thought must be employed in rendering the real world into an image, and each camera brand, model, sensor, lens and process must find ways to render that specific measurement, circuitry, coatings, aberrations, demosaic.
“An aeronautical engineer sure needs to have studied the sciences,” John Eremic suggests, getting down to his specific criticism of colour science, “But when he builds an airplane he calls it an airplane. He does not call it ‘A Science.’”
What specifically happens when colours are rendered by a camera has been better explained by smarter people, and I have listed a series of resources below. There is also a wealth of work published online by actual colour scientists.
Indeed, the science of colour that should most interest photographers is that of ensuring the best possible consistency of colour in our imagery across as many screens and viewing platforms as possible. It should not surprise many photographers that our images can look completely different on our calibrated screens than on our clients’ office monitors- and all good photographers develop strategies around this issue.
The work of actual colour scientists including Charles Poynton can provide useful guidance in this area. His PhD Thesis and Frequently Asked Questions about Color are a masterclass on the world of colour as science when applied to digital sensors, the standards which govern it, and the issues which arise.
Jim Kasson, another published colour scientist, has written on the misattribution of the term ‘colour science’ specifically:
“Conflating the camera and the raw development is a fundamental error here, albeit one that is rarely stated explicitly. I think many photographers unconsciously perform this pernicious elision. I believe that many of the debates that we see on the web such as: Whether Sony colors are better than Nikon colors. Whether Canon colors are better than Sony colors. Stem from misconceptions resulting from mentally combining two inherently disparate things.” — Jim Kasson, Roles of camera and Raw Developer in Determining Color
Too often in these conversations, accurate and pleasant are conflated. Ignoring for a moment the fact that our cameras are rarely out-of-the-box accurate, any photographer who is manipulating the colour and tonality of their images in any way is making an assertion that their perceptual taste is more pleasant than the out-of-the-box accurate colour offered by our cameras. We like to believe that we are still faithful to scene-referred colour, but any and every change is a deviation away from accuracy and toward our preferred colouration.
Several studies have made it clear that cameras of equivalent capturing ability can render the same colour. Commercial solutions by X-Rite colour checkers remain the industry standard for, uh, standardising colour: allowing photographers to capture a scene-referred image of a standardised colour passport which can then create a custom profile between what colours were recorded and what colours should have been recorded. Cobalt offers such profiles prepackaged so that a photographer could theoretically apply their old Canon SLR’s colour rendition onto their new mirrorless body.
Colour Theory
“Most photographers don’t want their images to have accurate color in them. They look flat that way, and skin tones look pallid. The second part of the color profile is used to get the “look” that pleases most people. Different distortions from accurate color seem to work best some circumstances and not in others. Different photographers prefer different color mappings. For these reasons, different profiles are supplied by most raw developer producers.” — Jim Kasson, Roles of camera and Raw Developer in Determining Color
What I propose is that we leave the term colour science in favour of colour theory — a necessarily broad term that nonetheless has room for discussion on preference, the mathematical conversions of real colour science, and indeed the house colours each brand offers and which we have previously misnamed as colour science.
Colour theory acknowledges the distance between the mathematical colour our camera records and the perceptual colour which makes it to our eyeballs and minds, all the while understanding the influence of preference and culture. Colour theory is a nebulous target which is necessarily informed by colour science, and yet becomes infinitely more complex for always moving toward the endpoint of our messy, inconsistent, and manipulable minds.
How has it come to be that we’ve taught ourselves that that nuanced and masterful creative authorship is as simple as choosing Coke versus Pepsi? Expertise requires more than simply memorizing (and then repeating) which of three or four prepackaged options is the best one.” — Steve Yedlin, On Color Science For Filmmakers
What puts the average photographer off these conversations is that colour theory is broad and complex, and the easy solution that better colour is as simple as accepting a specific brand’s marketing seems much simpler. The good news is that you already employ colour theory in your day-to-day life.
Canon acolytes describing just why they prefer the skin tones are colour theory in action, and once we have a working understanding of what we prefer, we are only a small step away from finding the tools to recreate our preferred colours in any scene.
I have heard from different sources that the Canon look lies in more magenta in the shadows (easily accessible in Lightroom’s profile corrections), or that it is shifting reds toward orange in the mid-tones (Again, Lightroom’s selective colour panels provide tone mappable and even maskable hue adjustments).
I would urge any photographer who has not tried these specific adjustments to attempt them, as not only may you find your preferred colour profile accessible from any rendering, but these adjustments are scalable, allowing you to make broader changes when necessary. These basic colour grading steps take control away from the camera and lend them to you, the creative.
“First, what’s pleasing to look at is completely subjective. There’s no right or wrong way to express colour when we’re talking about art, and also, what’s pleasing is often not that accurate… So, if we’re not boasting about colour accuracy because pleasing doesn’t mean accurate, we’re not helping beginners and we’re not informing experienced users, what exactly are we doing when we talk about liking the colour science of a camera?
Honestly, I think we’re only doing two things here, desperately trying to find something positive to say about a brand that we inexplicably love, by expressing abstract ideas in the face of an obvious lack of technical innovation. Or two, promoting how little effort on your part is required to render an image that you personally find subjectively pleasing, which is funny because despite it being called ‘colour science’, neither of those things is very science-y.” — Gerald Undone, Camera Color Science: What Makes Canon Special & Should We Even Care? [Video Transcript]
I’m ready to learn colour theory, now what?
I am convinced that a lot of photographers gravitate toward easy answers because colour theory is inaccessible and largely ignorable. Our cameras, editing software, and screens all contrive to make complex equations appear basic and immutable. For the photographer willing to engage with colour theory, I recommend first learning the basic physical properties of colour, followed by the specific issues of digital and photographic colour. I have linked resources below.
- Stephen Westland’s Series Colour Theory in 2 Minutes presents an easily digestible foundation for what colour is and why it behaves the way that it does.
- Feeling good about the technical side of colour? Visit Westland’s Advanced Stuff section.
- Do you understand how your camera creates colour? Cambridge In Colour have several great articles including this one.
- Above I quote from Youtuber Gerald Undone’s Camera Color Science: What Makes Canon Special & Should We Even Care? A video containing a great introduction to colour science which echoes many of the perspectives of this article.
- Marc Levoy’s Harvard and Google courses will equip you such that you’ll never need to refer to the Glossary of Photographer’s Woo again. Here are links to his slides on Trichromatic Theory and Colour applications in photography.
- Want to know exactly how each camera differs in their colour rendition? Cobalt’s website details their specific colour testing methodology with examples.
- Renowned Hollywood Cinematographer Steve Yedlin hosts a large section of his colour science education on his personal website.
- As mentioned above, Charles Poynton’s PhD Thesis and Frequently Asked Questions about Color will provide everything a mathematically inclined colour theorist could ask for.
