Cameraderie

Bird photography is most often associated with heavy SLR bodies that shoot at machine gun speed with long lenses nicknamed as 'Bazookas'. Show photographs of birds taken with compact cameras.

With X-10.

And I used it to replicate some of Fujifilm's film simulations on the Olympus Pen-F. The Pen-F is quite unique (along with its younger sister, the E-P7) in that it allows a lot of control over JPEG output in-camera. It's the only camera that I know of, besides smartphones and phone-camera hybrids, that allows setting the saturation of individual hues. This is one of the features that make the Pen-F so popular, I believe. Many people have used this functionality to great effect. Among the more popular profiles is the "Kodachrome 25" profile, originally created by user GarethB over on the mu-43.com forums: My "kodachrome/classic chrome" Pen-F settings (update) Rob Trek has even made a tutorial video that explains the process in more detail: These settings can be replicated in Olympus / OM System's "Workspace" raw converter software. Here are all the relevant settings at a glance: Now, there are a couple of websites that test a great variety of cameras. They usually provide raw files for their test scene. What is more, they include color calibration targets such as the "ColorChecker": This example is from DP Review. Imaging-Resource is another source of data. The regular structure of the colored swatches makes it possible to automatically detect the ColorChecker in the camera frame and extract statistical color data from it. This and the original Kodachrome 25 thread inspired me to write a collection of Python scripts that make it possible to match the JPEG color response between cameras as closely as possible. As the Pen-F offers many tunable controls, it's a great candidate for this application. For cameras that do not offer so many options in-camera, there is less motivation to follow this approach -- it's more rewarding to simply shoot raw, then apply the desired color profile with full flexibility on the PC. The software consists of three parts: Iterative global optimization. This first script analyzes the target color, the source color, and adjustment changes in the JPEG output to find an optimal transformation in 3D L*a*b* space as a linear combination of adjustments. Since the effects of color adjustments in the JPEG output are highly non-linear, this step is repeated 5-10 times until a rough convergence is reached. Hill climbing. This is a local optimization that has its starting point in the output from the first script. It offers an easy way to quickly test small adjustments, allowing you to fine-tune the profile to reach an optimal solution. Evaluation and plotting. This script visualizes the alignment of the ColorChecker squares in the L*a*b* color space. This is useful for analysis. Of course, the Pen-F itself does not offer full freedom in its adjustments. It's only possible to change the saturation of specific hues. It's not possible to change the lightness of different hues, or to shift hues around the color wheel altogether (only the "workspace" raw converter offers that). As such, a perfect alignment for color profiles that do more complex color space distortions is not possible. One prime example is Fujifilm's "Classic Negative" profile, which has extreme hue shifts. Still, the scripts allow you to find a solution that's as close as possible (under some mathematical definition related to the L*a*b* color space) to the target color profile. Here's an example of a color profile matching for Fujifilm's "Astia" profile. The two images show the alignment before making any adjustments (using a stock Olympus profile), and after making adjustments with help of the scripts described above: The left side shows a "top down" view where red-green is on one axis, and yellow-blue is on the other axis, with luminosity not visible. The right side shows chroma on the x-axis, and luminosity on the y-axis. Corresponding color swatches from the calibration target are connected with a thin black line. As you can see, the adjusted color profile is much closer to what "Astia" looks like on average. In a laborious effort, I did the alignment procedure for all film simulations of the Fujifilm X100V camera. Thanks to my Dad who was able to provide me with JPEGs for the different film simulations -- Fuji's raw converter won't let you use them if you don't own the camera! All the source data I've used can be downloaded here: DPR data: fujifilm_x100v_fs_dpreview - Google Drive IR data: fujifilm_x100v_fs_imaging_resource - Google Drive Here are all the profiles in a table: This table is available as a PDF here: Film simulations for Olympus Pen-F.pdf The source code of my software is hosted on GitHub: GitHub - fishcu/color_chart This is currently only a loose collection of Python scripts. If there is interest, I can write some tutorials on how to use the software, or even make it easier to use by programming a GUI for it. I would be very happy to receive feedback on some of these profiles (and the software itself for users who are comfortable with Python)!