GH2 Are skin tones really better with the GH series?

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Snapper123

Well-known member
Hey guys, it seems I've spent my entire year owning a Canon just trying to figure out how to make skin tones look decent - no matter what I do, or what short film I watch, Canon skin tones look horrid. Just awful. Red. Yellow. Green. Orange. It just does not end and seems to be everywhere you look.

However, I'm not sure if it's the camera or the people behind it, but I've been watching all sorts of videos where people are all out swinging a GH2 out in the blazing sun and deep dark shade, yet always, the skin looks so real and pretty. The colors just minimally glide from the faintest trace of blush red, to the slight blue or golden tinge of the sun, to power white, ect ect. Most all GH2 videos just make skin look beautiful. I haven't seen one GH2 video where the skin even begins to look as horrible as it does on so many Canon videos.

Any verdicts on this?
 
Snapper123 said:
Hey guys, it seems I've spent my entire year owning a Canon just trying to figure out how to make skin tones look decent - no matter what I do, or what short film I watch, Canon skin tones look horrid. Just awful. Red. Yellow. Green. Orange. It just does not end and seems to be everywhere you look.

However, I'm not sure if it's the camera or the people behind it, but I've been watching all sorts of videos where people are all out swinging a GH2 out in the blazing sun and deep dark shade, yet always, the skin looks so real and pretty. The colors just minimally glide from the faintest trace of blush red, to the slight blue or golden tinge of the sun, to power white, ect ect. Most all GH2 videos just make skin look beautiful. I haven't seen one GH2 video where the skin even begins to look as horrible as it does on so many Canon videos.

Any verdicts on this?
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canon skin tones are fine. but the title of this thread threw me a bit, I was expecting you to be comparing gh1 skintones to gh2 skintones. Now that would be a more interesting discussion instead of sparking a canon vs panasonic debate
 
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canon t2i skin tones

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From what I can gather is Canon's can't do dark skin tones very well, but manages very pale skin tones better than Panasonics, haven't had that much personal experience though
 
I don't have a Canon, so I can't speak from experience with those cameras, but I've never ad a problem achieving natural skin tone in my shots, as long as the white balance was set correctly.
 
There are a lot of bad examples of the Canon's rendering poor skin tones and that is partly because people are trying so many extreme 'super-flat' picture profiles. These can add add colour and detail in far ends of the exposure range but robs the mid-tones (ie skin tones) of precious data.

Also I think people rarely use the custom WB function on the Canon's (maybe because it is a different process to normal camcorders so people can't be bothered learning it).

It can even come down to what lenses you are using. I used to think my GH1 had issues with rendering colours all over the place until I figured out it was the different colour casts between my mixed bag of lenses (which included M42, Pentax, Sigma, Nikon and Tokina lenses of varying ages). Every time I switched lenses I had to re-do my white balance or the colours might change completly.

With my 550D, I am satisfied completely with the skin tones and colour accuracy I am achieving but that is more to do with experience and knowledge than the camera. If I had a GH2 and a set of glass equivelant to my EOS collection, then I'm sure I'd be getting the same consistant results. Long story short, I think it mainly comes down to the operator.
 
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Well, with my outdoor Canon shoots, skin is usually a complete mess; it's also a complete mess on 95% of the Canon video productions I see. However, it doesn't take two glimpses at the video section of this forum to see that about 5% of the Gh2 video productions have awful skin tones. Literally the worst example of the Gh2's looked like a better case scenario of the Canon's.

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?250426-Film-Look-Takumar-Lens-Family-Shoot

Here's a good example. Relatively speaking, the skin tones on this video are extremely pleasing to the eye (or who knows, maybe they're not, but after seeing Red for so long anything's a blessing), and yet it seems videos shot like this on Canon make people look like tomatoes. I never once got skin tones as good as this until CineStyle came out, and even then it's only been under strict conditions + it still makes everyone look like they're made of wax. I mean, before I discovered flat styles, I shot with Standard, Neutral, Faithful, anything I could experiment with and it was just all a mess.

With the Canon's, it seems the levels between saturation and light sensitivity are way off, causing you to either choose between having a realistic looking picture with extreme skin tones, or choosing between having zombie colors yet just no reds. With the GH2, it seems the camera is calibrated much better to pick up equally as much (or little of) color as light. I've seen only a few examples of a Gh2 truly picking up the reds, and even then I wouldn't have said it looked as odd as it did on my Canon shoots.

Here's something else:

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?246984-200-Words-a-short-film

How in the world? If that was shot on a Canon, it would look so ridiculous. However, because the skin tones don't look like someone has a winter cold, it looks downright acceptable in context.
 
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Panasonic's reputation for *embellishing* colours hasn't always elicited compliments from camera owners. This time, they've got it right. Skin tones are what we consumers use as our benchmark so Panasonic have finally made it theirs.
My nephew and my niece's boyfriend both work in retail HiFi stores. When my 85-year-old mother asked their advice about what TV to buy, they both said that after watching huge screens all around them where they work, the Panasonic TVs now have a tonal quality the others cannot match. She bought one. When she has guests, they *always* comment on the image quality. (You'll typically see a cut back to a newsreader and say to yourself, "now that looks so detailed and realistic!" We've all bought Viera TVs now. Me, I'm convinced Panasonic's onto something. I've gone full Panasonic, (LED Viera TV, Blu-Ray and now a GH2).
For me, what Panasonic is doing is no longer embellishment like they did back with my SVHS cameras which were fine with a green pasture but flared red here in the desert. They've finally got it right. And I *think* it's in the processing - not in filters or in increasing the green levels from a CCD.
Now, if anybody cannot see this, you're not alone. I couldn't either. Remember that, for TV's, a retailer sets all their demo sets' screen to "shop" mode. (read, "competition mode"). The Panasonic range is best seen at a lower luminosity. When you first turn the TV on, you might find it too dark and muddy. That's not going to sell you a new TV when you're in a noisy mall on a Saturday morning. But let your eyes get accustomed to the screen at home and you're in for a treat.
Now, I'm not talking about screens. The GH2 does good skin tones too. Maybe those Venus chips do some sort of vector processing.
I take the SDRAM card out of my GH2 and play it back on my TV and I'm fairly satisfied that I have a perfectly calibrated system. (We'd all forgotten about calibration, hadn't we?)
So there, Panasonic, please send my cheque to the same address as on my warranty. However, damn you for coming up with an AVCHD which nobody else uses. Damn you for the sticky relationship which makes me buy your stuff and for hobbling my GH2's firmware.
 
I think GH13 has better skintones than 550D.

But the 5dmk2 skintones are amazing. No, you won't notice any difference in video qualities on anything else. But skintones, is the reason why a reasonable number of professionals use the Mk2.
 
Roberto Hapsad said:
hob·ble verb \ˈhä-bəl\
b : to place under handicap
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I was aware of the word, I'm wondering what the GH2's codec handicap is. I don't have one so I can't speak from experience. I've seen some great images come out of that camera, just as they do from mine.
 
Roberto Hapsad said:
The hobbling does not refer to the GH2's colours, if that's what you mean by codec. I'm just delivering the standard "damn you" to companies who still try technological means to attempt vendor lock-in.
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"Codec" stands for compressor/decompressor, in this case AVCHD or MJPEG, the two methods of video recording used by the GH2. Sorry for the misunderstanding on my part.

J Davis said:
its easy to blame the tools ...
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SO true. The Blair Witch Project was made on a Canon XL1, after all.
 
CColton said:
"Codec" stands for compressor/decompressor,.
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Yes, I understand what codec means. I don't mind what codecs manufacturers use as long as their source is open.

I seem to have inadvertently driven off-topic your timely and fascinating thread about the GH2's skin-tone colour.
 
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Roberto Hapsad said:
Yes, I understand what codec means. I don't mind what codecs manufacturers use as long as their source is open.

I seem to have inadvertently driven off-topic your timely and fascinating thread about the GH2's skin-tone colour.
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Indeed, the GH's have good skin tone :)
 
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