James, looking good. Thanks for your test.

A caveat for this setting: stay away from fire engine reds and neon orange colors like those found on some street signs. You will definitely experience a pulsing from them. But if you can control your environment to exclude these extremes, I think it is quite nice.

Okay, here are some tests I just did with the latest preset settings - post #77 (I can't tell if there is magenta in these because my eye sees magenta now whether it's there or not. This preset has damaged me psychologically):

I like those!

M

Those look like wonderfully natural colors to me. I don't see a magenta cast at all.

These settings show no color cast on my A1, so now you have a preset that works across platforms.

I think you misunderstood where I was coming from. As I understand it Steve is looking to create a nice punchy preset that had a neutral colour cast. I was suggesting a methodology that could be tried to achieve that.

The other point I made was to respond to Ken Ross, who felt that a camera shouldn't have to be tweaked to get accurate colour. I was suggesting that "accurate" colour might be a subjective thing.

I wasn't makeing any comparative comments between the A1 and other cameras, other than to note (as you have) that Canon goes for a more muted pallette. And I certainly wasn't suggesting any sort of shoot-out!

Anyway, to my eyes the preset that has been created looks good. I've loaded it up, and I'm going to see if it works with my kids in the garden! :-D

Thanks everyone for comments and participation. This was a real learning experience but the lessons learned were very useful and will enable me to create other presets in a matter of minutes.

The key (assuming a preset with a neutral cast) was to shoot a neutral grey color (MacBeth Chart or Grey Card for absolute accuracy). Once I had the color intensity I liked, I simply balanced the RGB values by sampling the grey color in the shot and ensuring it had equal RGB values. There was some trial and error involved in this but I soon got a feel for what an incremental adjustment in camera would do. Of course there are much more scientific ways of doing this but I worked with what I had.

The reason it wasn't working before was I was trying to calibrate according to what my eye was seeing. I was thinking that the asphalt in my shot was close to neutral grey but, of course, that was absurd and it kept giving me erroneous results.

I wonder if you would care to share any specifics in regard to your method mentioned above? Perhaps a step by step explanation for those just digging into this like me!? Undoubtedly, you create beautiful images with your videography, and I sure many here would love to learn more from someone such as yourself.

I would like to follow your lead, but honestly don’t understand (based on your explanation above) how to calibrate the camera as you did. Any guidance would be very appreciated. Thanks again for all of your great input.

BTW -- the latest stills of your preset look great. I was curious about skin tones... very nice. And I love the Bokeh in the first image...

I want to keep the wonderful flesh tones of the above presets. It's very overcast and the light is flat in Denver on Easter morning. While it's expected that most people will adjust these settings to suit their intended application, an observation I'm seeing from the high color gain setting is noise. I think at color gain=40, from the signal to noise ratio there is less new color being added and the noise floor is raised. On the 50 inch 1080p plasma, I can see blooming of the colors and grain within the colors. By turning the color gain down to 25-28, there doesn't appear to be much real loss in saturation, but there's less overall noise everywhere in the picture. The noise that I see at high color gain also has the effect of negating sharpness.

Interesting Tom, I'll try it and maybe further experimentation changing the matrix settings may have less of a noise effect.

Anyway, like Tom says, this is a starting point and can be adjusted to taste. It would be great if those that use it as is and in a changed state posted some stills with info.

Thanks for the support,

Steven

More tests
 

I reduced the color level to 25 as Tom suggested and he is right, there is no discernible difference in the vibrancy but the noise level is reduced.

I wanted to test the preset's response to red so here are some more tests including another skin tone test with color gain at 25. While this is an intense red and it did fairly well, there are all kinds of reds that may look better or worse:

I'm leaving the matrix settings and RGB gains as you have them. Only the color gain, gamma and black level am I experimenting with. I don't see a problem with stills. The plasma however is more revealing than the LCD / PC monitors I'm using. I note that at +40 color gain setting, the processing seems less forgiving of the white balance. It might not be noticeable in mixed daylight, but in the current flat light, it shows up as a noticeable cast. But it's an "equal opportunity" cast because I saw it tend toward green at one end, and magenta at the other, without preference. It seems to be a consequence of the color gain being so high that the noise floor is on the threshhold of skewing the whites to either direction. But otherwise, the balance seems to be right in the center.

My last post slipped in after your latest stills, which look beautiful. Nicely saturated, and very clean, perfect balance.

...And beautiful bokeh! What zoom position and f-stop on those close ups?

Uh, don't remember the f-stop. I believe the iris was almost completely open and I was fully zoomed in. I took the shot from the other side of a large room.

Final settings for VIVIDRGB
 

Just so everyone knows what the final settings are:

Gamma: Cine1
Color Matrix: Normal
Color Gain: 25 (thanks, Tom)
Color Phase: 0
Knee: Low
Black: Middle
Master Ped: -5
Setup Level: 0
HDF: High (This can be "mid" if sharpness is 0)
H/V Detail: 0
Sharpness: 3 (adjust to taste)
NR1: Off
NR2: Off
Coring: 0
Red Gain: -2
Green Gain: -2
Blue Gain: -3
RG Matrix: 0
RB Matrix: 0
GR Matrix: 0
GB Matrix: 10
BR Matrix: 0
BG Matrix: -13

I agree completely and good observations. According to the Imatest software, at sharpness setting "0" the sharpening radius is very close to the 2 pixel radius standard sharpening level. HDF=high seems to apply a subtle high frequency filter to reduce moire and twitter, think bar code labels. On mid, I think the filtering is reduced permitting a reduced sharpness setting = 0. It's hard to see, but increasing H/V detail seems to raise the vertical resolution, but at unknown cost to the horizontal. I chose to accept the defaults since the picture is clean and artifact free.

Do you know how this would work or relate to the XLH1?

Mike

No but you might want to try approximating it and see what happens. The tuning on the XLH1 is not as fine as on the XHA1. The scales for the matrices and the rgb gains are 1-50 on the A1 and 1-10 on the H1. I would say use your best judgment. Chris Hurd did a good job of approximating my Panalook preset which I created for the XLH1 originally.