Ok, so I’m an idiot

…so what’s new?

Regular visitors to this blog (all three or four of them) will be somewhat aware of the tussles I’ve been having with the Samsung GX20 dSLR that’s recently come into my possession.
More particularly, with the colour balance of the pics that are the product thereof.
More particularly still, with the way that Adobe Lightroom appears to render the RAW files… leading to said “defective” colour balance.

Well, y’know how it is… you have a tooth that isn’t quite aching, but is on the verge. So you just can’t resist probing it with your tongue… constantly. Until it actually does ache of course.
Or the itch that you just can’t resist scratching.
Or the niggly little problem that seems to defy all resolution. So try as you may to cast it from your mind, your thoughts just seem to keep returning to it.

That’s how its been with me and the GX20′s “colour issue”.

I’ve fiddled with it, abandoned it, returned to it, tweaked it, got close to getting it right but not quite, and become thoroughly frustrated and bored (in equal measure) by the whole affair.
Yet could I leave it alone? Could I buggery!
The more kindly mates of mine (um… mate as in singular) have charitably remarked upon my “tenacity”.
Tenacity nothing. Sheer pig-headed obstinacy more like.

And in this sheer pig-headed obstinacy I decided to do a bit more research. On matters such as RAW conversion, camera profiles (with particular regard to Lightroom) and the like.
You wouldn’t believe how much highly technical and completely incomprehensible information I’ve forced my poor brain (er… that alcohol-sodden mess of completely scrambled tissue that’s my excuse for a brain) to suck up.

Yet out of all of that emerged a pointer that seemed worth investigating…

A nifty little feature in Lightroom (one that I’d typically paid absolutely no attention to before) named “Camera Calibration”.
And right at the head of it there’s a function called “Profile”… with a little drop-down box to it offering two options: “ACR 4.4″ and “Embedded”.
“Well”, thinks I, “this looks interesting”.

So I do something virtually unprecedented… resort to the Lightroom helpfile. Which turns out to be a whole set of pages on the Web. Providing answers to all the problems that seemed insoluble when I first started using the program. Really wish I could get my head around the bizarre notion that help files are there to help. Ho hum.
Some more reading and, if I’m understanding it correctly, the “Embedded” option only appears in the Camera Calibration feature if the imported file contains its own camera profile differing from the default ACR (Adobe Camera Raw presumably) profile included in Lightroom.

The temptation to play is just too irresistable. So I re-import a RAW file from one of the first “colour test” shots I did with the GX20, and tentatively apply the “Embedded” profile option.
And don’t do very much else. A tad of sharpening. A slight lightening of the shadows. And that’s it.
And voila! It appears that the colour problem I’d been encountering has been virtually resolved… to my eyes anyway, and peering at the resulting JPEG suspiciously on a couple of different monitors (one colour calibrated, the other… um… not).

If this truly is the solution to the so-called “problem”, resolved simply by recognising that the RAW files produced by the GX20 each contain their own unique “profile” (which may well go some way toward explaining their massive size), then I have once again cause to berate myself for being such an idiot in not having realised this earlier.
And for not noticing that Lightroom (lovely program that it is… drool simper drool) enables the reading of such embedded profiles!
As it happens I did in fact remark, in a comment to an earlier post on this topic, that “I’m not yet totally convinced that the fault isn’t with me. Maybe I’m just doing something incredibly stupid…” Which is pretty much the same as stupidly not doing something I should be doing.
More to the point, I curse all my mates who’re Lightroom afficionados (yep, all one of them… and you know who you are) for not having mentioned this incredibly useful function to me, knowing that I was struggling with what seemed an almost insurmountable problem. (Mind you, such recalcitrance is I suppose excusable on the basis that its merely a reciprocation of my own sense of humour that compels me to stand by and watch unhelpfully whilst my mates struggle with problems for which I know the easy answers. Hmm. Chickens coming home to roost and all that.)

So I take back all that I may have rather unkindly said about the GX20. If the colour issue’s sorted this easily and I can use Lightroom to process the pics, then it is indeed a truly super camera.

For which no doubt my regular visitors (few though they may be, and likely to get much fewer if I keep on posting about this particular topic) will breathe somewhat more easily, in the comforting thought that they won’t have to suffer any more of my whining about this matter. Heavens be praised! (Gotta admit, I was beginning to get bored with it myself too.)
But at least in this tediously long iteration of my woes and travails re the GX20′s colour balance there exists a compelling testament to my idiocy, unfolding before your very eyes… virtually in real-time. Validation indeed of why I originally titled this blog “Adventures of an Idiot“! Laid bare for the whole world to see and gloat over. (Or shall I just delete all the pertinent posts? Hmm.)

One of the originally offending images

As an aside to this whole affair, in the course of my fairly extended reading of all those incomprehensible white papers and stuff I absorbed the rather useful tidbit that in fact, certainly in photography and more specifically digital photography, there’s actually no such thing as accurate colour rendition. In any objective sense. Essentially it all comes down to what the “creator” (the photographer) sees as the most visually pleasing rendition. So there!