Raw images display incorrect colours

[boletus]

Hi all, I am having trouble getting RAW files from several cameras to display correctly in Preview, Finder and Photos. The colours are totally off, they appear very warm in tone and much fine detail is lost, nothing like scene that I originally saw. If I take a JPG and Raw the JPG shows the correct colours whilst the RAW file is totally wrong. This seems to hold true for Nikon, Canon Panasonic and Olympus RAW files, has anyone else had this issue? I'm on a M1 Macbook air with all the latest updates to Big Sur applied.

 

[hazzery]

I get this way worse problem where my RAW files do something like this about 40% of the time. Its very annoying when I go to upload all of my photos from a shoot onto Lightroom and a whole chunk of them are unusable because of this problem, meaning I have to delete and re-upload them :/

This has been happening since I got the laptop in December.

 

[boletus]

Hello hazzery, your problem appears as if its the cable or card reader that you are using, try a different cable and or a different card reader or even using a different SD card in your camera. The image you show is not an uncommon problem with a fault in the cable.

 

[hazzery]

Hello hazzery, your problem appears as if its the cable or card reader that you are using, try a different cable and or a different card reader or even using a different SD card in your camera. The image you show is not an uncommon problem with a fault in the cable.

The images have coppied over to my Mac fine. If I try opening the image again so that the preview is removed from cache and has to re-render, chances are it will look fine. Its just when I open raw files approximately 30-40 percent of the time they will render incorrectly.

 

[dwig]

Hi all, I am having trouble getting RAW files from several cameras to display correctly in Preview, Finder and Photos. The colours are totally off, they appear very warm in tone and much fine detail is lost, nothing like scene that I originally saw. If I take a JPG and Raw the JPG shows the correct colours whilst the RAW file is totally wrong. This seems to hold true for Nikon, Canon Panasonic and Olympus RAW files, has anyone else had this issue? I'm on a M1 Macbook air with all the latest updates to Big Sur applied.

The is no "right" or "wrong" here. RAW files don't have "color" or "sharpness" or anything else until that are processed by software to generate a traditional color image. Cameras will simply record the raw data from the sensor and add a set of processing parameters to the RAW file's metadata. Those parameters tell the camera's dedicated software/firmware what the desired processing should be. These parameters are, for the most part, specific to a camera's proprietary conversion engine. RAW files in DNG format, instead of other proprietary RAW formats, are more universal.

What appears to be happening is that Apple's software, all of which rely on a RAW conversion engine of Apple's own design and embedded into the OS, are failing to deal with the parameters in the file's metadata and are instead simply using their own default settings. Adobe goes to extremely great lengths to read as much of the metadata as they can and to mimic the proprietary conversion engines of various camera. That way, there software defaults to producing results much more similar to the results created by the in-camera RAW to JPEG or RAW to TIFF conversions.

BTW, when you "take a JPG" you are ALWAYS actually taking a RAW image. Digital cameras can't do otherwise. What you are doing is asking the camera to convert the RAW image to JPEG when saving the file rather than having it save the RAW data. Many cameras offer the open to save both. The in-camera conversion to RAW uses any adjustment settings (color balance, contrast, saturation, ...) that you may have chosen (simple cameras use factory defaults for these). When you save as RAW, these settings are simply written into the metadata and don't have any impact on the RAW data itself. It is up to the conversion software to deal with them.

Also, even simply displaying a RAW file on screen require processing of the RAW data and conversion to the display bitmap format the OS uses. Most RAW files will contain a low resolution preview image in JPEG format. Some apps will use this when displaying RAW files.

 

[boletus]

Hello dwig, thank you for you detailed reply, much appreciated. You are correct in all you say and I am conversant with how RAW and jpg are displayed normally. The problem here is that Apple seems to be applying a wide gamut colour profile that is very biased to the warm end of the spectrum to all files that don't have a colour profile already assigned to them. In practice this means that should I just take RAW images (as I would be normally) then the images are displayed with this strange colour profile that totally oversaturates the image making it impossible to check which images to further process for display or printing. I have been taking RAW + jpg so that I can see from the jpg which images are worthy of further attention. My normal Raw software would be either Rawtherapee , Darktable, Olympus Workspace , Digital photo professional 4 and finally Gimp, I am not an Adobe user. I really posted to see if it is just my Macbook that is affected or if this is happening to every Macbook or Mac running Big Sur.
Again thank you for responding, its very much appreciated.