View Full Version : Sony PXW-Z90 Color Saturation Adjustment?


Len Rosenberg
July 7th, 2024, 02:32 PM
Can anyone tell me how to reduce the saturation of only red color on a Z90?I have the menu settings set to exactly what Doug Jensen recommends in his excellent course on this camera. The output is great except for one thing - skin tones are crazy red. I can fix it in post but would prefer not to do the extra work on 60 to 70 video clips I expect to record this coming weekend. If there is no way to reduce the red saturation I can try reducing overall saturation which is set to +2. Thanks for any help!

Len

Christopher Young
July 8th, 2024, 12:29 AM
I'm not familiar with D.J's Z90 settings for the Z90. Maybe Doug can chime in here with a suggestion for you.

Z90s and A7 series cameras don't run a full SMPTE Matrix which makes it a little hard to work on individual colors re Hue and Saturation. Though, they do have a menu setting called "Color Depth" in each PP. This tends to affect the luminance of each of the colors in that menu. Should Doug not see your post in time, you could in the meantime try selecting the Color Depth menu and try knocking the 'R' value to a MINUS setting. Maybe around -2 or -3 and see if that helps.

Chris Young

Doug Jensen
July 8th, 2024, 10:59 AM
Can anyone tell me how to reduce the saturation of only red color on a Z90?I have the menu settings set to exactly what Doug Jensen recommends in his excellent course on this camera. The output is great except for one thing - skin tones are crazy red. I can fix it in post but would prefer not to do the extra work on 60 to 70 video clips I expect to record this coming weekend. If there is no way to reduce the red saturation I can try reducing overall saturation which is set to +2. Thanks for any help!

Len

Hi Len,

First of all, skintones should not be crazy red with my profile, so the first thing I suggest you do is check to be sure that your monitoring is accurate. Are things actually as red as they appear to be?

Next, you want to be sure your white balancing method isn't making things too warm. How are you setting WB?

If either of those things don't solve the problem, then, as Chris already suggested, dial down the "R" setting in the COLOR DEPTH menu. That might fix it, but to be honest, I don't own a Z90 anymore so I can't test it to see if it would change skin tones or not. The Z90 is a fading memory and I'm just going by the notes I made while doing testing in 2018.

If Color Depth doesn't fix it, then I'd suggest reducing the SATURATION menu back to "0".

If that doesn't fix it, then I suggest trying one of the other four COLOR MODES, such as "Cinema".

Good luck. Let us know what you find out.

Len Rosenberg
July 9th, 2024, 07:47 AM
Thanks very much Chris and Doug for your suggestions! I will try them. Much appreciated.

Best regards,

Len

Len Rosenberg
August 1st, 2024, 02:51 PM
It appears that the problem is how the camera reacts to the lighting in this venue, which is a very large conference room in a hotel, can seat about 1200 and the ceilings are 30 feet high. The lighting is all from old style flourescent fixtures. This time I used a white card to set a manual white balance, and that corrected almost all the colors except red, which was over saturated (dialing down the saturation in the picture profile didn't help) so the skin tones of the performers were extremely red. I've shot this event for years using a Panasonic HC-X1 and never had this issue with skin tones. I've used the color temp slider in Adobe Premiere to reduce the red in the skin tones, but it still doesn't look right. Any suggestions on how to address this in Premiere?