Color tone questions

STGill · May 19, 2017

I've noticed the P4 Pro camera has some wild shifts in it's color perception. Sometimes there is an orange tint to everything. Some photos and a video like attached for illustration. All were shot at the same place and time of day. It was very bright, pretty much high noon, and I had an ND filter on, but I have also noticed this at other times of day without filters. The camera seems very sensitive to the angle of the light. I've also noticed the ground gets very dark if the camera is rotated up as far as it will go (I guess it picks up the sky as the focus?).

Is this normal? I admit the P4P is the first really pro level camera I've used. I know high noon isn't great for light but I would have thought all the photos would be affected. I can edit in post but I wonder is there's a setting I'm missing. The video isn't as drastic as the photos, but to my eye there's a bit of an orange cast that shifts to blue/green closer to the ground.

Video example:

GMack · May 19, 2017

Try shooting in Manual mode instead of Automatic where the exposure can change due to the sky or ground. Maybe set the white balance fixed to 5,200 Kelvin too and see how the colors go.

STGill · May 19, 2017

Sure, I'll give it a try. Still honing my fly and film at the same time skills. I have not dug much into the camera settings, I'll see if the video camera has options as well.

Meta4 · May 19, 2017

STGill said:
I've noticed the P4 Pro camera has some wild shifts in it's color perception. Sometimes there is an orange tint to everything.
I've also noticed the ground gets very dark if the camera is rotated up as far as it will go (I guess it picks up the sky as the focus?).

Is this normal? I admit the P4P is the first really pro level camera I've used. I know high noon isn't great for light but I would have thought all the photos would be affected. I can edit in post but I wonder is there's a setting I'm missing.

Keep an eye on the White Balance setting.
When things look very yellow like that, it's an indication that the white balance is acting up.
normally auto WB will be fine but occasionally it might have a hiccup like this:

Here's what it looks like on your live view, note the number next to WB auto is saying 10000K which is much too high.

If you find this happening, the solution is to set the WB manually in the camera settings
Here's the same shot after I set WB to Sunny:

You'll find your WB settings here:

As for things getting dark when you tilt up to the sky, look at what's on your screen.
Looking upwards, you get a small area of darker foreground and a larger area of bright sky.
The camera is giving you an average exposure setting across the whole screen which will mean that the smaller, darker area comes out under exposed as the camera is mostly exposing for the larger bright sky area.
If the whole frame had a similar brightness, the overall exposure would be better.
Try to avoid those high contrast situations or over-ride the exposure settings by telling the camera which area you want to expose for.
You can do that by tapping the green focus square at the top right of the screen to change it to a yellow exposure indicator and then tapping the area you want to expose for.
But doing this in the example you mentioned would result in the sky being overexposed.